In our corporate office, we have a rather large IDF feeding multiple floors. It’s not my ideal setup, but it was here long before I got here, and it’s grown over the years. And it’s become a bit of a mess…a thorn in my side and something I’ve long wanted to clean up…but just never made the time. Well now we have made the time, due mainly to the end-of-life of the existing (8) 3560 switches (three switches in the rack 1, three in rack 2 and two in rack 4). Here is the ugly “before”…

Such an embarrassing mess…

We stayed late Friday evening and ripped everything out…and I mean everything. We installed 8 new Cisco 2960-X switches, all stacked as a single switch. Nice!! We also installed additional vertical and horizontal cable managers, and had all new CAT 6 patch cables in various lengths to reduce clutter. What a difference it makes…

Ahhh…much better!

We started the project right at 5:30 PM, Friday evening, which works well as employees wanted to get home! And we finished at 1 AM. Not bad at all. For verification, we walked almost the entire building, checking that everyone’s Cisco phones were booted up and properly registered. One of us will be at work early Monday morning just in case we missed anything.

Having a clean and organized cabling infrastructure pays off big in terms of easier maintenance and troubleshooting. Trust me!

So, I had to make some changes on the router at our DR (Disaster Recovery) site, located in another state. As I posted about before, setting a “reload in” command can save your bacon if you make a configuration mistake and get locked out of the router. So I did. And then I made all the changes, tested everything, and saved the config. Job well done. I logged off and started working on something else, but I had this nagging feeling…did I forget something? No…I don’t think so. Then it hit me…the router was going to RELOAD shortly, if it hasn’t already.

I quickly logged back into the router (it was still up), and I got this upon login…

Just in the nick of time

Whew…I still had 7 minutes before the reload would have kicked in. As you can see, I cleared the reload, and breathed a sigh of relief.

What did I learn from this? Geez…I don’t know…that I’m getting old? Yep…I guess I am.

Here is the followup to my post on Friday concerning the 100 pair feeder cable replacement. Things went very smoothly, for the most part. There were some issues, but we handled them as they came up, and we finished the project by 3 PM Saturday afternoon.

My main area of concern was removing the old 100 pair cable and getting the new 50 pair cable successfully installed. Most of the conduit is 4″, but there is one 400 foot section that is only 2.5″. With both the 100 pair and fiber installed, there is no way we can get the 50 pair installed first. We needed to remove the 100 pair to make room, which means cutting the 100 pair, and that means no going back.

So we did get the new cable installed from the main building through the first two conduits (all 4″), prior to making any cuts on the old cable. Here is a picture of a pullbox mounted on the side of the main building…note the yellow pull rope already installed. That was nice of the previous vendor many years ago. However, we used the pull rope to install mule tape, which I like better…it doesn’t stretch, plus it is more resistant to creating heat which could burn through any existing cable, such as the fiber Internet circuit (that would not be a good thing at all).

100 pair cable and yellow pull rope

The next section was the 2.5″ conduit….we then cut the 100 pair cable on both ends of the conduit, and pulled it out (and used it to pull in a heavy duty mule tape). We then pulled in the new cable with no issues. There was just one section of 4″ conduit left to go, which went quickly. We ended up getting the entire cable installed Friday evening. Here is a picture of the spool of new cable, and one of the vaults along the path…

Cable spool and vault

Here is a closeup of the spool hanger, which makes everything MUCH easier…

Spool hanger up close

Saturday was termination and testing, which my vendor completed around 1 PM. I then had to move any phone lines that had been terminated on pairs 51 – 100 of the old cable, since they no longer existed. After that, I then tested every single line and the PRI circuit, and verified proper operation. No issues were encountered. I’ll return on Monday to complete my documentation and a bit of remaining cleanup.

And yes, I am breathing a good bit better today…

Yes, I’m back. Sorry for the long absence…I’ve been swamped with a variety of life events, some good and some not so good. Yet in all things, to God be the Glory.

So, what is outside plant (OSP) cable? Well, it’s cable designed to be outside (or perhaps underground), exposed to the weather. The copper or fiber strands are surrounded by a very thick and hard plastic covering, and certain types of OSP cable contain a jelly filling, which would ooze outwards in the event of a tiny hole and not allow water in. Very cool.

At one of my remote sites, we have a 100 pair copper cable that feeds both data and voice services to another building about 1500 feet away. This cable was installed many years ago, and has a number of splice cans along it’s path. Over the last year, the cable has deteriorated substantially, and keeping the many analog lines up and running is almost impossible. (This site is still a large user of faxes and modems.)

Here is one of several pull boxes located along the path…note the conditions of the vault and the splice can located on the right side…

Wet and muddy pullbox

So I hired a vendor to remove the entire 100 pair cable, and install a new 50 pair cable in one long continuous feed, no splice cans at all. The vendor is also going to clean out all of the vaults and layer in some gravel to aid in drainage. We start at 3 PM this afternoon, working until sunset, and will return tomorrow morning. We hope to have the whole project completed by Saturday afternoon.

Some of you might be wondering why I’m going with a smaller, 50 pair cable, and not another 100 pair. Well, the 100 pair cable was installed way back when every desk phone required it’s own pair of copper. Back then, all of the phones were fed through this 100 pair cable. Plus we had multiple T1 circuits for data needs too. Now, though, our phone system is Cisco VoIP, which is handled via the data network and a single PRI circuit, plus the data T1’s have been replaced by a separate fiber network, so the need for 100 pairs is not there, and will never be there. A 50 pair cable is smaller, cheaper and easier to pull, and it will give us plenty of spare pairs if our needs grow.

I will take pictures of the process and will let you know how it goes in a couple of days. Have a great weekend!!