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Gary Parker

Siri, show me physical technical debt

(We’re clearing out at least 30 years’ worth of accumulated cabling under a datacentre raised floor. Lots of voice copper, co-ax (voice and Ethernet), serial cables and even some AppleTalk!)
14 November at 17:34 | Open on cyberplace.social
25 comments
Shingyō Kōsei (心行 光生)
Gary Parker

@Kosei ah, it’s all good fun, although my knees may disagree

14 November at 17:41 | Open on cyberplace.social
Gary Parker

…and this is the other side of the same cabinets!

Take over datacentre management, Gary, they said

It’ll be a new challenge, they said

What could be worse than managing Teams, I thought…

#wcpgw 😂
14 November at 17:40 | Open on cyberplace.social
matt303

@WiteWulf dealing with cables is probably less stressful than dealing with people.

14 November at 17:41 | Open on mastodonapp.uk
Gary Parker

@matt303 you can strangle someone with a cable if they upset you, but not the other way round, so yes, you’re right 😂

14 November at 17:42 | Open on cyberplace.social
Chris Ahchay

@matt303 @WiteWulf you can throw cables away if they don't work

14 November at 17:45 | Open on mastodon.gamedev.place
0x4d6165 :ecoanarchism_heart:
Alexandra Lanes
@WiteWulf @neil What’s AppleTalk’s native physical medium?
14 November at 17:44 | Open on thegoatery.dyndns.org
Fellows
Andrew Davison

@WiteWulf Aww, I once had a room with that exact floor! Underneath looked familiar too, though mine also had hundreds of copper audio tie lines terminated to GPO / B-gauge patch bays. Madness.

14 November at 17:48 | Open on social.dvsn.net
Gary Parker

@andy you should be able to see the old BT DP to the right of the picture with a 30-pair hanging out the bottom of it. This particular building never had a PBX in it, oddly, as it was (and still is) the main computer centre for the site.

14 November at 17:50 | Open on cyberplace.social
Andrew Davison

@WiteWulf I see it! 😁

Though our copper and patch was all for recording studios, so it was recently installed. Think the building went up in 2007.

14 November at 17:54 | Open on social.dvsn.net
Gary Parker

@andy somewhere in my archive I have photos of the GPO frame in one of our oldest exchange locations. It’s all vanished wood and polished brass. A lovely piece of work 🥰😎

14 November at 17:58 | Open on cyberplace.social
Karl Auerbach

@WiteWulf Ugh, I've had to do that. And I've seen worse.

There will almost certainly be that unknown and unmarked cable, that seems to not be used - but turns out, after being cut, to have been critical to operations.

Then there will be those that are ad hoc power cables - use of a Fluke (or equivalent) power-sensing wand is a prudent step to take before cutting the cable.

14 November at 17:50 | Open on sfba.social
Gary Parker

@karlauerbach we’re cutting as little as we can for exactly that reason, and nothing that we can’t find at least one disconnected end on (ie. no flowing electrons)

14 November at 17:52 | Open on cyberplace.social
Karl Auerbach

@WiteWulf On the Interop show network we have had to clear our shownet wire out of Las Vegas casino spaces - that's scary, but not for technical reasons - it's that the casinos are quite protective of their networks and we didn't want to be visited by Guido From Baltimore.

I've encountered a seemingly disconnected end, such as when a wire is being used as an antenna, but that's rare. Sometimes there are microphones , fire sensors, or other sensors down there.

A lot of people do not know that many cables are factory marked every few feet with distance numbers and other identifiers that make it a tad easier to figure out which cable is which.

Some really old cable types have a layer of grease under the outer layer of insulation. Yeech.)

@WiteWulf On the Interop show network we have had to clear our shownet wire out of Las Vegas casino spaces - that's scary, but not for technical reasons - it's that the casinos are quite protective of their networks and we didn't want to be visited by Guido From Baltimore.

I've encountered a seemingly disconnected end, such as when a wire is being used as an antenna, but that's rare. Sometimes there are microphones , fire sensors, or other sensors down there.

14 November at 18:12 | Open on sfba.social
Matt
clew

Technical debt but saleable assets? :) what’s the current copper price?!?

@WiteWulf

14 November at 18:07 | Open on octodon.social
Gary Parker

@clew the 3-phase cabling we pulled out earlier will maybe go to a recycling site for sale 😀

14 November at 18:09 | Open on cyberplace.social
Mx. Eddie R

@WiteWulf
Last time I did that it took the office next door a week to debug their network; they had kms of cat5 back & forth all through the building and I cut a bunch of it out in the middle to clean up our cable runs.

14 November at 18:10 | Open on wandering.shop
mmu_man

@WiteWulf some people still use those, don't throw them!

14 November at 18:13 | Open on m.g3l.org
Mx Autumn :blobcatpumpkin:
undead

@WiteWulf

I still have nightmares over how much social engineering went into implementing change controls and doc requirements over physical cabling at one gig...

14 November at 18:16 | Open on hackers.town
skab

@WiteWulf Still looking more manageable than Teams, honestly...

14 November at 18:18 | Open on troet.cafe
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