#019: Small Office / Big Cabling Rehab!!

hello guys this is our new project this is a company that used to have a pretty big network in here with the previous tenants and now is so much smaller one so I'm being asked to come in here and clean up this cabling so it will start at least with the the feed this is their Ilyich feed this is a bonded DSL modems with a lot of pairs and those have been running over embarrassingly through a clip hole this is actually supposed to be where the clip holds this cabinet in place and I have to move that no there's there a PBX system right there and so this is the cabinet that we're gonna be cleaning up so we've got a patch panel most likely we've got a lot of direct lines running in and just this cascade of switches to to deal with and so it's it's little things that will give me clues on this stuff so for instance even though this these rack spaces are clearly marked which with where that spaces are somebody mounted one kind of in between and you'll see that the holes don't line up because of that even though it looks like this might be completely uniform all the way through so I know that basically whoever was working on this really wasn't familiar with rack mount equipment so we're gonna start exploring and figuring out our game plan for this today so wish me luck kids here we are shooting are looking above the cabinet and you can see that the cables are basically laying straight on this in this case pretty tore up middle it's probably fine but this would have been an instance where I would birds have been secured to the wall or even this little piece of backboard just to keep it from touching the edges it's still not a big deal the big issue now is this is my pin so this tells me which way this cabinet is gonna open so this was my first clue to figuring that out okay so I am pretty much done with what I would call just kind of a inspection or detective phase discovery phase of the rack here in the network room so why not go over a couple things that I have found here and kind of explain what's going on so there is this is the feed from the outside this is their internet connection and it's gonna give them I believe five IP addresses and so what this red line runs down to there there what's going to be their phone system a new blade phone and this black line that I've now run goes to a little Netgear switch just a dumb switch and what that does is it splits to two separate consumer grade routers so there's one and then below here through this big mess is the other so each of these routers is grabbing their its own static IP off of the the feed from the internet just pairing through that switch I'm going to try to eliminate that device and see if I can get the provider to open up one of the other ports I already tested them and the two other available ports aren't there the whole idea here is to eliminate single points of failure so some of the other things I've discovered so up here is their security camera system so a separate technician is the one that installed this router and this upper portion so there's a switch here another switch some pili injectors and so here's a new one for me I haven't actually seen this before but it started when I think let's see if I can find it now yeah here it is I found this cable and so this is interesting so hopefully it'll focus that's there we go so what I've got here is a cable that was looks like the what is that the brown and blue pairs were were cut off and dumps done some sort of pigtail like that and then the other two pairs the green and orange were passed on through to the rj45 connector so I strung figure what in the world is this and then I found another and it happened when I was tracing back all of the power cables and where they went so I found this a little you know brick over here and I traced the line back and lo and behold I found another so what is this you can see the same deal so there's two pairs in here that are passed on through and see if it'll focus on that here we go and runs up to this switch and what this is is a handmade MacGyver's to style p OE injector same as what that other cable was this guy right here so what is normally done like on this switches of peeli injector this is a whole rack of p OE injectors they simply wanted to make one of these non p OE ports have p OE on it without buying a POA adapter I must have been that this this particular power supply that guy just happened to have around and it got it to work so we're not touching any of this stuff in fact we've already been told by the security camera guy just please leave my equipment alone that's going to be unavoidable to some degree because I can't have this cascade of cables interfering this all should have been a run off to the side because the this panel has to you know open and close and it needs to stay on the on the hinge side so some of this is gonna gonna have to be moved but I can see you know he basically ran out of ports here in fact even on the the router there's two these these two guys because if you're not familiar with this this is how you turn a standard cat5e cable and pour it into two to Lyons's so if you don't know fast ethernet or that's a hundred megabit Ethernet connection only needs two pairs and it only uses two pairs and any modern switch will sense what the speed is and work with it so even though we've run four pairs in a cable we always get this cable out of the way we always for fast you can it only need two pairs this is where you'll wind up with voice over IP that actually uses one of these lines for the phones and then the the fourth pair is the power power line peel week all of that changes with gigabit so this is kind of old school but this is how you squeeze a bit more ports out of a single cable run in a building I'll see a lot of this so that's what this guy did he ran out of lines here so one of these this is the LAN feed this goes to there this switch upstairs or at the top of the rack and then he ran two of these some devices somewhere in the building you can run around either to the side he did that again here which you know it works it's not very clean looking but it works looks like he handmade jumper cables I don't do that anymore it's just too time-consuming and you don't really save any money when you buy short jumpers in bulk they're pretty darn cheap but basically this whole upper area is just for the security cameras and it's a completely separate network separate system from from day to day operations and what I'm gonna do with this is I'm actually gonna move the router up to this shelf I'm gonna put power up here and keep it completely separate but look at how this rack kind of came together so there is a patch panel if 24 ports of which are here and this just waterfall of jumper cables down to a 24-port switch down there so yeah you could have this is what you could do this Union put a little cable management you run them down the sides you run them back and you'll wind up with a bunch of slack too to deal with to make it you know clean and everything else and so I've got two 24-port switches here and we're actually going to be replacing all of this with a 48 board but you have to think about why you would do this so there's all of this space right here above even right here is where a average person would stand and do work without too much discomfort so I understand why the security guy a security camera guy might have put his equipment there that's where I put in mine so I don't have to bend over or sit on a chair and all of this is is terrible for ergonomics and and I point this up because a lot of these guys that put these in aren't the ones that actually maintain it who have to be here for maybe hours I was here for three hours tonight just to figure all this out not very comfortable so even this scenario over here so there's a table here I really appreciate that I rarely get a table and a chair but all of this equipment overhead is is behind it so when I have to work on this I've got to lean over the table not easy to do it's a pain in the neck actually I would have put this table over on this side put it next to the rack maybe none of this stuff's getting used so you have to think about this when you install equipment and let me show you in another example of this typical telco providers will install equipment like this and you look at the fact that it's sideways why is that and there is a reason the reason is so that you can see the ports you can see the the LEDs the activity lights on this oops and just drop the tool here on this equipment and you can access the cabling and it's the same thing over here with this piece of equipment so like for instance you could have actually mounted this up high this way where all that cabling was down because you could stand beneath it and look but you have to take this into consideration when you mount equipment that's someone else in the future and it may be you will have to maintain it and have to troubleshoot it and and have to look at those activity lights so some other things we've found here so all of these 66 blocks on the far sides and probably that one right down there they're abandoned so all the lines have been cuts that go to them I think this just kind of loops behind it so I'm gonna pull all these out some of the other things I've seen I'm not sure about what I'm gonna do about this I'm probably going to secure it up overhead and and make it so that any cables that do pass through here are are secured and they pass through without touching the sides probably gonna get rid of this mushroom a spacer it's it's under a lot of stress anyways and then I'll wind up securing these to the tie wrap points I might move these to the same opening there's no reason for them to be on their own opening and then I'll put some figure out a way to edge guard this knot not quite sure what I'm gonna do these jobs usually involve a few iterations to figure out but the fact that I'm gonna be creating new patch putting in new patch panels and and redoing and redressing a lot of this gives me some latitude to fix some of these other maladies that that go on something else that clearly no one's taken into consideration is this hinge point so you've got a lot of these droopy lines you've got power cables in fact I think underneath area underneath there is an outlet strip you can't see and I've got an outlet strip here so what should have happened is a bit more of cable management with that everything should come through one hole it should be secured and run up this way and at least there looks like a decent amount of slack already on the patch panels so I can probably you know pull it over to this table to do some some work on it if I need to but so what I'm gonna do is a lot of these you know miscellaneous messy power cables just kind of randomly run I'm gonna run them all to one side and down of course I'm probably gonna put an outlet strip right here and of course this is all before I'm going to wind up putting a UPS in right about here at the bottom so that will clean up a lot of this too but that's something else I'm gonna do I'm probably gonna pull everything back out of that line and go into this one because this hole right here has no edge guard but this one does into wider there's no reason why this should have been used for which couldn't have been used for everything so I'm gonna clean up a lot of this as well so the next step in this phase is going to be I'm gonna wring out a lot of these lines from the the other end the far end and see what what comes up so I'll use my low voltage Pro for that so I'll show you that in in a little bit and start to figure out where some of these go and the main reason for that is well and not on these this is the cameras but the main reason down here is we've got a lot of lines that don't appear to be active and I want to know if they are machines that are off or if they're actual ports that aren't being used and I'll show you why I need to know that in a moment two different tools I'm going to use for testing and kind of mapping out the network this is the guy the flu can tell its own pro and it comes with or it usually uses both of these guides this serves a specific purpose and then I'm using a low voltage probe also a specific purpose so with this guy I can get some very interesting things right away let me see this will show up in the light so if I turn this to service the very first thing I can tell is at the moment it's an open so that basically means that out of this rj45 female port it does not see any type of connection and it's going to see either it's gonna see an actual you know voltage on the line for both lines one and two and those are the two Center pairs and then the two that the pair that is what we have the the center pair and then the pair that is on either side of it and so basically how that's going to work is an rj45 like this the two Center pins are for a phone line are where that's used and then the pin four to either side of that center pin are the second line so this guy right now sees there's nothing there so what I'm going to do now is take this cable which I've plugged into the switch over there and trying to do this one-handed and see what happens okay so if I plug it in now it sees the network and it tells me that you know symbolically it also shows activity so if I'm not here if I'm just somewhere in the building and I want to know what's in a port this is very important information for me and I can even put an rj11 connector in here they're they're you know physically compatible and it will tell me if it sees phone lines or at least if it sees voltage on both of the pair's so the other interesting thing about this is I can actually send tone to this line and now a normal standard telco toner won't work on a network cable that's plugged into the network but the intelligent probe will do that so now I've gone two-tone I'm gonna turn on my toner and it'll sync up and I mean I'm physically close to it so I'm gonna walk away over here but the the blue line it's this one right there is is the is the cable that's hooking to it's okay just getting in the proximity you see a little label show and it's like a write up on it it gives me that this trend so that's that's a real handy tool when dealing with Ethernet and trying to figure things out so here's another tool that I find very handy with the until its own pro yes I can this piece detach and I can do cable testing and they turn this guy and while I talk but the most important thing we turn this guy off to most important thing that the whole reason I got this guy was for the ability to beacon and that's this little beacon tests so I'm on the RG rj45 data portion of it's the only one portion I actually need or use for this but this feature is much more it's much more expensive in any other tester than I found and it's simple so I'm gonna plug this guy in and this is this is would be a scenario where let's say I'm downstairs or I'm you know somewhere on the floor and I got a cable and I don't know where it goes and maybe I don't have this or anything but I can't send standard tone I want to know where this is I know it's on the network somewhere but I don't know where so I'm gonna go down to my options and I'm gonna choose the beacon test and it only uses one two three and six and hit OK and so it tells me that the beacon feature is active and so now I'm just gonna do is wall so over here to our switches so you'll notice that every single switch shows it lights up and then chily these are Hannah Hannah I really don't like when when lines are blocked over like this and then these are all separate from from that but it makes it handy in this particular moment when I'm trying to look for stuff so what I'm looking for is a blinking light but I'm looking for a slow blinking light and I think I found it right there there it goes again so what is that guy I can't even see through my camera so that's 11 and I go over here to 11 and there it is and that's definitely the cable so if I can see the activity lights and you know I can and this one also it's pretty easy to do but this works everywhere because it's part of the standard like even if I go over here and look at this dumb switch it would work in here with those activity lights it would work down down here with those activity lights so this a super handy tool for tracing cables that haven't been labeled haven't been mapped or anything like that absolutely worth the money to to get this low-voltage Pro I think they're red now I think the back the the the screens are backlit so you don't need light in the room to use them so super handy love this tool it saved me tons of tracing and troubleshooting here's a typical example of what I'm running into at this office and what I actually run into a lot so here is somebody's workstation and what's here is another router and you would normally see this if it was even done correctly without using the LAN port so by putting whatever this this is probably the feed from the network room by putting it into the the for LAN ports it becomes basically a switch and actually you can configure these to just be a switch but to do that you need to not use the wind port and not everybody catches that especially because the problem with this is typically if you haven't configured this just to be a pass through a switch or I think they call it a bridge this winds up isolating this equipment from the rest of the network this is the way that routers work that way there's a way in in a LAN and the only can see each other through the router I don't know how this is configured but we want to eliminate it anyway so the only thing here is this PC and this big printer so I have a network drop way back there also have another network drop right here so I'm gonna have to figure out what's in these lines so I'm gonna wind up popping these off and see if I can find out where they go I'm hoping that these weren't like torn out or anything like that so we'll find out real quick here quick thing about these wall plates I'm real fan of them I've seen them a lot I'll probably start stocking on these soon if I find the right version so what I like is the screw that holds it in is sitting behind this bit of clear plastic and there's a position where you can you basically pop this off and you can put in a label and that labels not coming off I really really like these the the one issue I have with any I've run into so far is that these are not Keystone connectors so this is not an industry standard this is proprietary to this brand so what it basically means is if I want to if I need to replace a connector or put in a new one or a different color or whatever I have to go through this manufacturer so I'm trying to find an outlet plate like this a network drop plate that I can do this so it's got a good nice place to put a label that's not gonna you know get torn off but uses Keystone connectors so hopefully we'll find one but anyways I wanted to just show this I really like these guys so here's what I found out so far so I used my Intel Intel atone Pro to inspect the the ports on this active network drop and I definitely found that the blue one was showing Network and the yellow was basically cut dead and I think the two above are RG 11s so I put the beacon function on and definitely found it in the network room but you'll see here it's marked it says p12 and I did find that on the patch panel in port 12 so that that definitely checks out I'm hoping the rest of them are exactly like this that are active but here's the interesting part so here's an actual view of them this is probably the same way to set up and obviously this one doesn't have anything marked here so most likely this one hasn't been a run through but look at the look at what I'm finding here so these are blue cat 5 cables I can see that the rj11 is on the top which are you will see our slightly smaller only use two pairs so they ran a single cable to give them two separate two line phone line jacks for this and still have a home run but the the important thing that I'm showing you here is the clues I'm getting so these are blue cables and and there are a certain thickness or a certain style so I'm going to look for these back in the network see what I find so here we are p12 as as I'm guess I'm figuring out their scheme here so let's look at the back now here's the problem all these cables are white and this is one of the clues you'll use the style of the cable tells you a lot about where where they go so this is my clue that tells me essentially something is happening in between here that is is changing this so most likely there was an existing infrastructure and you can see there was tons of infrastructure in here before that was just cut dead and so someone must have come back through here and and cross-connected these white cables to the blue and so here's what I'm looking at so it goes down into the floor and thankfully we move this guy over there's some really wide holes in the ground so I looked in here and let's see if the camera can capture it here I look down in there you should be able to see there we are but there is some patch panel down there looks like a 24 port patch panel that's basically being used since if I am pointed here it's being used as a cross connect yeah so that's it's underneath these cables so I'm gonna have to figure out a way to find it this crawlspace because it looks like it could be pretty handy so what I'm hoping is that either these guys this is basically being used as a cross connect so I can I have a bit more latitude I'd like to pull it out of here if I can but I'm gonna have to see if I can gain access there to do that ideally I would pull these these these patch panels these cross connect panels out and try to bring the original cable all the way up to the top just and the main reason for this is to eliminate problems for people in the future so down in the house I found this hatch was mainly from looking at all where all these cables were in and they had to come to a point like this so there's access here and this is most likely where they've done the patch now let me show you what I found up in there okay so just looking in and over a little bit I see a patch panel but these cables don't go up so this must be a different patch panel but definitely here's a lot of these lines that were cut from the earlier infrastructure so what's interesting I see here is they use the patch panel mainly to tie in these cables and they ran regular patch cable instead of solid core cable all the way over here and then way over there is another patch panel I'm gonna show you in a minute and that's the one that goes up so this this is just a lot of extra work this should have been a in an interior line that just ran straight to a point here or they were spliced two in and should have been spliced in so I might look like I'm gonna wind up repairing some of this too but the idea is we're gonna be able to reuse some of these lines now that I know where the axis is and eliminate all those switches on the on the working floor see how this looks with the with my light in it okay well after a bit of acrobatics and yoga to get across there I managed to get kind of fully inside here and you can tell it's dusty anyways way over there is where the other patch panel is that's the that's where I came through right there so those lines run over and this is it this is the patch panel that we were looking at from up above and there's the hole where we were looking through so this and and here's some other guys that go the other way so the mass majority of them go this way and then we got a bunch that go this way so the used patch cable long patch cables for the front and then solid cabling on the back damn infuriating is what this is this should have been done with one-to-one splices this did not save this guy any time at all this was a lot of extra work having to patent punch these all down in two separate locations you know way over there when this should have been one continuous run and if you're already here why not do all of them there's the rest of the lines there right there this would have taken no longer or very little much longer time there's some more splices here I really pity whoever comes behind this I'm gonna do my best to prevent any problems with this stuff but what this does giving opportunity is now I've pretty much solved the mystery of this location so now I know that this is where the lines run I know where all of them go so now I can actually look at those extra a patch panel or network drops that that we're coming up as an open and run them up so I'll send tone I'll find where the end is so either over there or over on that side and I'll be able to connect them all into the same switch in that way we'll eliminate all those extra switches and routers that are downstairs so yeah this is what you get when you try to save money and it doesn't save you money so here's an example of and I've actually talked about this before I've done this slightly differently but this is completely adequate this would have been a simple splice to do very secure easy to identify even where they are you can wrap these in electrical tape if you want but leaving them like this is perfectly fine this is a simple and fast splice so they in this case using a jack to a connector this would have worked this would have worked for every line instead of this elaborate patch panel scheme and this would have saved them a lot of time so I'm gonna probably wind up doing this on every one of these lines here's a little example of what we're trying to eliminate I'm basically here in this office space and this is down on the first floor and looky here I've got myself a little Belkin router might be just a switch might be a wireless access point who knows running up to this network drop so we know this is a live network drop and it's being used to share a network connection the fact is though just a little bit over I've got another network drop I've got a network drop right here that one looks like it's labeled so it might even be usable and drop right here so in reality all of these essentially network splitters are unnecessary and add further complication to a network that's about to be taken over for management so we're going to be eliminating all of this additional complication so here we are I'm pretty much down to the last few steps I'm going to do on this first night here so it's after 10 o'clock and I've been instructed that everybody's or at least if everybody's here they're not gonna need any internet connection so now I can start kind of unhooking things with reckless abandon and actually uh before I did that I wanted to show you here I took out all of these abandoned sixty-six blocks and that really cleans things up got rid of all the extra screws that were left in here and I wanted to point something out - so somebody mounted a backboard in here I don't know if that was done originally or whatnot I can see it was at least at one point painted so so that's nice but this isn't always a blessing I'll show you why so this is what looks to be a little bit larger than quarter-inch plywood in here actually it doesn't even look like plywood it looks like a fiber board which is a terrible terrible wood to have to put screws in it's very soft so it's easy to drive things in but it's a very soft so it's easy to pull them out and it's not very strong and the other thing let's look at these screws so here's one of the screws I pulled out and it's no wider than than one of my fingers but even there are no long but even with that short of a length you see I can show you the issue here so it is gonna hit the back of the metal case of the metal frame of this chassis pretty quickly so it leaves you just a little bit of gripping power now on these sixty-six blocks that will work out okay but not everybody brings really little short fasteners in their toolkit so you'll notice this guy's loose and I know exactly why this guy is already bottoming out against the metal frame behind here and I found a lot of I found a lot of Fester's in here that were in the same boat because they were fairly long this one kind of although it went all the way through you really have to be careful with putting fasteners through these but you don't know what's behind here so something to keep in your toolkit I don't have it with me but some very short but very coarse threads are ideal for this situation and so these barely do the job they'll do the job on holding up a 66 block where the the mounting base and you'll see that in the right here you know these things are really really thick because it's only plastic so it puts you pretty far away from the frame but if for instance I wanted to hang a device like like this guy here you know where my my head is only gonna come out just a little bit these screws aren't gonna be too long to do that there won't won't pull it off so make sure you carry some very very short I'm talking quarter inch half inch fasteners that with some very coarse threads are not easy to find but when you do buy of them by the hundreds so my last step tonight and I'm already about halfway through is separating the cabling power on one side data on the other and I understand you know this is the hinge point right here so I'm gonna run my power in and sit right there and then along here and up so I I have all of the security camera equipment off and unplugged but I kept the the individual lines plugged into their prospective respective units and I just kind of drape the cables over so I've got this side are the this this top half done but you can already see it's starting to improve the the cleanliness of this network and even here so you can see like this power cable comes through it goes god-knows-where and runs through all of that data cable so I want to get all of this separated you'll see how they're all intertwined I'm gonna get rid of this mess so I might have gone a bit overboard here but I did a bit of cable cleanup so I dressed everything to this side I kept a few of these bundles independent because they represent different networks until they run down here but I zip tied everything down also new power cabling so I ran all the power cables to one side made a stack of the bricks that I secured in with zip ties got a secure line over here this is the outlet strip that just goes for the camera equipment up above and then I think the power strip for everything that is their data network so if I stand back here I've made a few other changes so these switches that were widely spaced down low I've shifted up so everything is kind of consolidated at a regular organ Amish a height and all the cables have been separated into data and power so it makes everything nice and clean and then on the other side I did something similar so by by bringing the switches up higher I'm able to dress to the side the the long patch panels that are now in this so this now gives us the ability to at least start troubleshooting easily so I can I can look in here I can make runs I didn't leave these to IRA I left these loose I didn't make them tight so I can kind of pull cables in and out from here but this definitely makes working on this the setup much much easier for the time being so this let's see it's almost almost 2:00 in the morning but I've got everything back up and running and from here I'm gonna we're gonna we're gonna stew over this a little bit and figure out what we're gonna do about the cabling that I brought showed you below where they've put in patch cables or a patch panels but I'm happy with how this network looks it is very easy to see the the equipment and the layouts of everything there's not a lot of congestion so this is a good stopping point and from there we're probably going to have the customer decide what they wanted and because it's going to be a bit pricey or at least a bit of an extra expense that they weren't anticipating but for the time being we've got a much cleaner and now fully understood Network one last thing I wanted to mention on this guy now that I've got everything a button backup is this vertical track that was put in I wanted to point that out for an interesting reason so I'm going to hook this guy again so there are lines and I found these also came from that that crawl space underneath these white lines here that runs straight up through the cabinet some of them go this way and those are the ones that go to the camera system but these other ones go to all these punch-down blocks and that was at one point and probably as partly now their phone system so they you know as you remember they were they spliced into it with those patch panels down below but this was really unnecessary to have run these guys inside this cabinet like this when there was an exterior track that would have been awesome to do this with and would have made things much more accessible and gotten rid of a lot of clutter inside this so I really am NOT happy they did this okay we're back on this site day 2 and here we've got our backup power supply this is a 15 v8 rip light I like these guys the nice little LCD screen there for information so we've got the the whole system now running on backup power ultimately we're also going to have the CPS over here and even the PBX system for however long it lasts all of this equipment will run off of off of a backup power and at 15 VA at least with the calculations I did all this equipment even over there should be able to run continuously for about 4 hours including 48 port pirie switch so first up we're gonna do today I want to get these patch panels in and figure out where they're going to get located and this will determine our jumper cable length as well down to the 48 ports which 224 for pant patch panels 148 port switch so we'll want that in very close proximity I want to move the video system up high over head height basically somewhere in this area and I want to ultimately start with patch panels across the top and I want this at basically eye level and ergonomically speaking and why I've talked about this before so we want the equipment that we need to work on what you need to put our hands on and deal with day to day we want this at this level wanted a hand level nothing to where we have to bend over or deal with will put the the UPS down there because it has to sit there because of its weight so this is what I'm gonna make room for and we'll go from there our goal tonight is basically to bring up this new 48 ports which this is a ubiquity POS which I think this is the 500 watt unit and our patch panels are gonna go here so what I've done what I've done is I've moved up the video surveillance network the which is independent to about as high as I can stand I could go higher but I think it would become uncomfortable to service and so I managed to find slack and all but one cable so I'm gonna check that check that out when I start running new cables down below this floor but I'm considering stacking this equipment all on one side just to keep the cabling a bit neater what we're gonna do today is essentially port over everything that goes to these two the switches now to this one 48 port Ubiquiti switch and that will eliminate this Hardware tonight should be pretty simple so I wanted to go over also a little snag I ran into here so here's the second patch panelists would have gone basically just below that one and this was the connector I was going to use I've got a got hundreds of these so this is a this is a standard Keystone connector that is you know female both ends so it would take you know the patch cable go in the in one side and then we would basically terminate the other end with a male rj45 and this was it was interesting thing to try and I I may still do it but what I found so there's these little notches in the in this and the opening which is not typical this is just another standard Keystone wall plate so what happens and even let's see Lemongrab this guy so at the bottom of this connector are two big bumps and these would fit in here no trouble at all they would they would catch down at the bottom there and work just fine but these pass throughs that I got hundreds of they're there stop at the bottom is much narrower so what I found out here is that that clip basically just slides right through and won't stay I'm not sure what I'm gonna do I might just go get a big bag of the standards for these guys which is a narrower version of this because this guy would not would not fit in here obviously with all these other guys adjacent would would interfere so they make a version of this that is just as narrow as that so I just get a bunch of those and keep these keep these panels hopefully the narrow version of this doesn't have this this same problem I really like this design it's one stamping of sheet metal looks like it was laser-cut I've got my strain reliefs back here so I'll be able to secure the cable without ever messing with the the connection at the at the connector here's a bit more of what I'm thinking of doing strategy wise at least at this point all of these lines to the current patch panel are gonna get to get pulled they're gonna get pulled back down down underground or under the floor here to the crawlspace and pull it all the way back so there's a patch panel right here there's one way that way under the subfloor and then another one in this direction so I'm gonna pull these all the way back to where they they go into the first patch panel and just do a splice and then run a continuous cable back up to the patch panel that's gonna allow me to make sure all the cables come through this hole and not this smaller one without edge guard make sure I've got all the proper lengths so this looks okay this that what this current patch panel looks and okay and what I mean by that is first of all there is not much of a strain relief so all the weight of these cables is resting on the the insulation displacement joint at the backs of these panels I like having a bar there so for instance there's a there's devices like this that actually screw into the the size of a iraq and they provide a little bit of a base to tie your cables to there's options like that but I really prefer this so I'm hoping to find a way to use these panels or find a different design I also like these because they're quote-unquote modular as opposed to these guys here so if if I have a problem with either the installation displacement connections or anything internally within any poor what essentially happens is that port is just dead I'd have to you know mark it off as not available anymore so basically these these patch panels just you can't repair them so that's one of the reasons I really like these Keystone patch panels something else that I'm gonna be working out with with this is the patch cable distance now I was hoping that I could go one-to-one with port numbers but the switch goes one two three four five six like that so I'm not gonna be able to you know run these kind of sequentially through so it's probably it'll be a patch panel here and here and that'll be these two over unto these two and so on and so on so that'll at least have them looking even I guess so that'll work so I'm gonna be figuring out what patch panel cable links are gonna run here so there'll be the second patch panel here and then a space so I may wind up using a six inch at a one-hour 12 inch I'm a rind up with just two twelves who knows I want to minimize though unusable space now I need I wanted this space here to separate the two networks I want a space here because I don't have like three and four inch patch panel our patch cables but anything further then we put in I want to keep everything pretty compact just to compensate for a few of the future growth so here's where we are at this point and I'll update you in just a moment so here here we are now with a bit more significant cleanup performed so I'll start at the time work my way down so I moved the router and switch that was here over here and the main reason for that was cable lengths so this guy here actually does not have any slack left in it it is running straight down into the into the floor if I find some slack I'll probably to give it some relief but to kind of mitigate those banjo wire issues I've moved everything over to the cable side at least with that stuff and it still looks fine I'm gonna go back around here so I've got both patch panels in and I'll get to those in a minute and then the I moved up the current router and then the switch that we're trying to trying to eliminate by using available port on the modem here's our existing patch panel and patch cords I kind of cleaned a bit of this so they're all the same type of cables same length and it's a one to one port ratio so I now have essentially these guys as my straight run offenders so these are the guys that have have a connection somewhere in this facility but are not going through a patch panel so these will ultimately become a part of the second patch panel so I've removed the two existing switches you know that that this one 48 port replaces and and this is an important spot so what I've done is kind of a mock up so I've I kind of you know made some guesses here and I put my two patch panels you know directly on top of each other just one you know unit of space between that and this and I left this space because I knew I was gonna be using this switch for a shelf for the time being I'll probably put a regular shelf down here later on but what I wanted to see was this interface so here are here's the basic little plan you know what that I would run one cable from above one from below and they would occupy you know above and below ports on the switch now what I'm seeing here is that this is now this is a half foot this is a six-inch patch cable this is a 12 inch patch cable and so this one looks just right this one does not end the biggest problem with fallacy if you can like capture in the camera here is this so once you get all these patch cables in this door is not going to close if I use a 12 inch patch cable at this distance so I have some options one is to actually create a a one unit space between the two patch panels and since I don't have room to go up I will just relocate these two devices down one unit and see what that does so that's so what I'm gonna do next but a lot of its basically show that that you go through these iterations you know especially when you need the exact right cable length I ran into this issue with all of my other videos but it wasn't as severe but once you get all of these ports filled out yeah this is going to be an issue so there is a bit of mock up you're gonna need to do until you know exactly what cable lengths you're going to need and in this case you know if if I wind up keeping this arrangement that the spacing where that's just one space in between I might wind up ordering you know about 36 inch patch cables and then maybe 38 inch patch cables to just be long enough to reach there but not you know bow out like it like they do here so this is yet part of the experience so here I've moved the two these two guys down one rec unit so now there's kind of a even spacing between them all not completely sold on this idea but it does happen to solve the right solve the issue of touching the cable and actually I think and it's not gonna come through with the light but I think it still does touch the cable but it just isn't as severe what I also did is I moved the top patch panel down to the bottom one so it kind of even things out that way as well so yeah these are kind of some of the things you're going to run into got it mock it up and see how things how things get laid out so I think this is what I'm gonna do so I'm going to now need to get some six and 12 inch patch cables I don't have any eights actually in my box so I might get some of those as well just for the future so I'm probably going to use a model price unlike that vendor and they've got some amazing prices but the the network has definitely been simplified so just having two patch panels and 148 ports which as opposed to one patch panel and a bunch of direct lines and just the stack of equipment all spread out this will be a very condensed simplify Network and hopefully these two guys are gonna go away and we'll be left with one ubiquity router I think it's a USG so that will live here as well so what I would do if I were going to work on the security camera system is I'd probably put a patch panel at the very top I put that one there and then start replacing my equipment again probably with a 48 port Ubiquiti switch so that all of these peeling injectors all this equipment goes away one unit takes care of it all so that's probably what I do and maybe we'll do that in the future sometime so looking in the back not terribly exciting but definitely a lot cleaner mainly just from having less stuff here and I really haven't done a lot of work on cleaning up the cables for power mainly because a lot of this stuff is still yet to either be removed completely like the the router it's here and the switch or I'm bleeding on hardware's so when I was likely what I'm gonna do I'm not gonna use outlet strips most likely what I prefer to do is run a vertical power strip along the side of the rack most likely on this side to you know keep data and one side and power on the other or what's called a PD you and that's basically a rack mount one you I device that just as a surge protection and a bunch of outlets on the back and there's a few other options here so we're gonna explore that but anyway so not bad for a day well in the evening anyways we're getting pretty close and most likely our next visit I'll have gonna partner with me and I'll be underneath here pulling pulling new lines so we'll be able to replace this this run of cable to this patch pal and then get rid of that patch panel so well we'll run it although new lines up to the new patch panels so moving right along it's been a long night and here is where our network stands this has been moved down and I've started to sort things out so the first 24 ports go to this this fellow here our feed for the switch is there gonna be orange and then any direct lines that will remain will stay over here and then our new 24 port patch panel is going to go going to start to populate here haven't replaced the router yet or this guy but that's that's in the works this now is a temporary patch panel I'm still waiting on one for monoprice a little bit of a shipping delay and I'm very happy that I managed to place all of the security camera equipment and got away with a single 24 ports POS which some of the equipment needed these specialty weed injectors and I have the feeling it was because of a different voltage requirement but because so many lines were either used using the router for this or this even having multiple small switches well every time you make a connection you lose two ports it was a port on each machine so actually a 24 ports which even though there was a 16 port there was an 18 port and in their reports being used on the router even though those were all being used 24 ports was plenty even have a few extra and they're all running active so there was also mostly a lot of work done on the subfloor we've we've run these six new lines and plans for running a lot more pretty soon spent a lot of time today ringing out all the equipment in the office so we'll get to show you some more but I also wanted to show you just how much equipment has been eliminated from this rack so here's all the equipment that we've managed to remove we removed these two 24 port gigabit switches with the 48 port from ubiquity that's also a POS switch so if anything pol II like VoIP phones in the future come into play these would not have been able to handle it so a single 48 port replaced these two twenty fours these were switches being used for the security camera system four of these were PUA based and all of these all of this one were being used I eliminated all of this equipments I eliminated the macgyvered POV injector so got rid of that plug I government limited the brick that was powering this and several other bricks for for this guy on the shop floor we've removed one router and several more our and aren't probably our next to visit so all of this equipment is now eliminated there's definitely a novelty factor to making your own match cables finding the right connectors the right tools right testing equipments and hand make your own case I remember when I made my first few and I thought you know what I'm gonna do this now on I'm gonna always have the perfect lengths and and that's just the way it is I don't know why why haven't other people done this and I quickly realized that that wasn't really the best choice financially and this guy here made that same mistake the fella that installed this camera system and actually this is a lot of this is new but this still remains was just to tie some lines into a POV injector and he thought this would be good what I'd rather do with this actually is move this over and mount it against the back wall or something and run a regular patch cable and just keep this like that that's another story but these cables take time to make and you know I can get six inch patch cables I buy them by you know 50 s and hundreds they're about 50 cents or less per cable and in quantity so that's it's not viable what's your time worth making these I can do this one connector using a easy RJ which is a special tool I can do one of these in about two minutes so ok 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 of these times 2 is 16 different connectors times 2 that's 32 so it's a half an hour your time doing these guys what's your time worth one of the nice aspects about using a modular patch panel over a punch down one is when I'm dealing with these tangled messes so like I've got my I think this is probably a 25 pair cable that's just kind of woven through on this this is actually the the one conduit that is got edge guard next to the equipment rack I'm migrating as much as I can off of that one there I think all that's left on that line now on that conduit our analog point of voice lines that are gonna be going away which is good as a that kind of it makes me nervous also god I think one more line down there to move over to this single large conduit but when trying to untangle some of these messes it's nice to have a modular patch panel up above so I can call to a partner and say hey unplug this or that send it down to me all unsorted and send it back no problem [Music] something I'm going to be doing on this project as well you'll see here that so I can get a good view here there really was no thought to structured cabling so as cabling increased over the years so did the load on really one support and this is like that way all the way down all these lines have just a single plastic clip and and so much more has been added over the years and you know well I'm gonna be removing this bundle here with with a new one right here this runs diagonally and I don't want it to do that I want it to run along the edge and along the edge so I'm gonna have J hangers installed big 4-inch ones running along all both of these edges and that's going to alleviate a lot of these support problems and a lot less zip ties it'll just you know lay a cable inside the channel and and you're good another example of why structured cabling is important people ran this giant bundle and they used the conduit for this light fixture as a support and the the clamp that was holding that conduit gave loose and now it's just kind of resting on this luckily all this is going away but yeah you got to give us some thought to how you're gonna support your cable you know looking at one of these patch panels down here in the subfloor I can kind of see why the previous technician would have done this I mean if I was standing here looking at this cable head you know I know another one on the other opposite corner of this area thinking about all these individual splices I'm going to need to do and how much of a pain that's going to be I can I can easily see going to putting in a patch panel I think if if this had been mounted you know further back to add some slack to the line and these guys are right at the the edge and there you can't even add anymore if if if this had been done if the patch panel had been put in properly yeah I I might have I might have left it and if the cables that came out of it just went straight well not straight like they do now but you know along the the wall along with all the cables around the corner and then completely up and into the patch panel in the rack above the above the floor and this would have been lievable this would have been acceptable the fact that this patch panel is fairly precarious and how it was mounted and how its secured and all that but then it goes to another patch panel for going up to the first floor or to the the network room floor just adds complexity and difficulty in troubleshooting and so because of that I'm gonna have to replace it but yeah I can I can easily see thinking about going to a patch panel looking at all these splices I'd have to do alright here we are at a semi finished state first thing I wanted to point out is that most of the cables that were run through these other holes have been relocated and in several pieces I found out that the lines were abandoned this last remaining line is actually of analog voice line I've got two Reis Pleiss down below and then rerun even for their server I popped the line up through here and around instead of having it run across the floor I have to admit having this extra hole has been very handy you can see the this is the last remaining bundle to be removed from this conduit that doesn't have edge guard down below everything else has been either relocated or rerun this whole bundle here is going to go away real soon so let me show you where the real work was performed so I have temporary patch panels in place these three panels this is the bank of 24 and this will be a bank of 24 you'll see that I you know had to space them this way so this 24 pet of 24 port panel is going to be replaced with these two for the time being these are the new lines any new lines are going into this upper panel so eventually I might have just waiting for hardware both of these are going to get replaced here is the security camera system and network I have finalized the location of these cables so what I did here might remember there was some tiny handmade cables that ran to appeal the injector up here so I did away with that and got just regular longer patch cables and these are actually now set two lengths that's why you can tell that I turn the knob around on the zip tie when I'm finished and no this is not going to move so let's take a look at the inside here here's the ple injector that I want mounted wasn't too difficult and now these lines that used to string across and go in that way are now nicely secured and then these are now just regular patch cables so this really cleaned things up in there I'm very happy with it so those are all final locations everything else pretty much is still in flux so I've got various bundles so this is waiting to be terminated as well as well as these but they're terminated all down below in the subfloor some other things I know my power is not going to move so I've gone ahead and secured them on all the really important ones and then I've got my major bundles just just zip tied so that they don't fall through so eventually I'm gonna have a large bundle that that comes up out of the large the main hold and it makes kind of a s figure s before going up into everything and that's so that when this rack opens it's not going to cause a you know any too much trouble there'll be some flexibility so I have a ton of slack below that I'm gonna be able to pull from oh I wanted to mention this guy here so this is just a phone line these are all the analog lines that run over to the punch down block over there you may remember this was on a big mushroom spacer pretty much the same as one of those and it was just bent over and worked and everything so I started using these guys actually it's one of these so I got a nice and secure using two zip ties on each one and by basically building up the stiffness with zip ties on these cables you could pretty much shape them and direct them where you want to go so please for the time being it's not gonna touch any of these sharp edges and I'm gonna dress this out good size come up with a solution for this but you can do this you can you can guide your bundles to avoid whatever you want so anyways want to point that out all right we're at we the the critical stage here I've made a commitment move I've pulled the primary patch panel most all of this offices equipment has been running off of this patch panel we're where you've put in a second patch panel for new lines that we're adding but this was the big deal so I I have to finish this tonight so this panels going away it's going to be replaced by this one and it looks so nice I I was very surprised that this would work with a six-inch jumper without a space between but I'm very happy it is so we're going to run as you can see here one panel above and one panel below the switch I was thinking of doing them all to one side but realized that in this case the the activity lights for these these ports are are on either side anyway so it really doesn't matter there's not going to be an ideal location to run the jumpers so that you don't block any of those activity lights you're gonna block them one way or another so this is the cleanest most compact way to do this I'm very much looking forward to doing a before and after with with this arrangement so here we are I'm but we're going to get rid of this panel we're going to be adding a power switch over here this a lighted power panel we'll label those guys so we're going to be deciding where that goes in here most likely somewhere up high don't want to necessarily put it too close to the UPS but we'll see and I'm debating whether to put in another patch panel for the camera system we'll see these are already routed to the POA injector back there so these definitely aren't moving but I might patch panel these guys so we'll see anyway so it's gonna be a long night have a lot of work to do under the floor here and I'll probably be showing you some of that real soon so I did decide to convert the camera system to patch panels so I'm actually going to reuse this 32 port patch panel for the video system just because I happen to have it and I don't have anymore or enough of the narrow Keystone connecting up connectors so I'm gonna have to use these these wide ones that I got that actually aren't are so wide that they won't fit on a 24 in this arrangement but they'll absolutely fit on this patch panel it's a very simple Keystone patch panels all I think it's a patch panel blank is the way some of them are referred to and something that's a note here is that's really a keystone character can amount to just look pretty much a rectangle so it essentially means is if I need to change the orientation of the connector I have that latitude with something like this so I'm using these flat ribbon patch cables another one of these instances where I just happen to have these I don't have enough of these six inch patch cables that are nice and around like I prefer and the reason I really don't like using these is typically you wind up twisting it to line up the between the two connections but with this type of patch panel actually if if they didn't line up I can always switch the way that the connector goes in and it it would connection they have no problem at all so I was able to use these match tables and this will be a nice neat thing now something else of note here is this guy is going to sit directly underneath this this panel so I'm not going to have access I mean this is a pretty deep switch you can see here I'm not gonna have access to the back of this patch panel or at least not easy access once this is in place in fact I don't even have easy access now so I've simply hung the panel you know with some zip ties off the rack after I've already tied it in I've already moved the cables across and now I'm putting in my strain relief so I've zip tied the strain relief just temporarily to the panel and I'm gonna start mounting my guys simply and I'm gonna leave enough slack so that if I ever have to come back to this panel I can do the same thing I can just unbolt it pull it out and leave it connected to the switch so if I have to maintain this guy in the future no problem I am now beneath the network room and we're soon to have all of the old cables removed and now pretty much everything in this conduit is just analog phone lines that I'm really not concerned about most likely these are going to go away once we go to a VoIP phone system so everything will be running off of the network but the the main thing I wanted to point out down here right now is a evolution in cable management so this was kind of growing organically so here for instance is an example of what was in this building and over the years as things expanded no real thought was given to cable management's or structured cabling of any sort so you wound up with what you see right here so a lot of cable a lot of heavy weights and it is all pulling on one little poor little nail holding on for dear life and it's like that all over the place and the area and and honestly it's not an expensive solution to repair which it we're actually about to do so all of this cabling over here is going to be pulled all of this diagonal white cabling is going to be pulled and it's going to follow the wall but here is what we're going to be putting in so pretty inexpensive I think a box of 25 running about 60 bucks and a couple of screws and you're good this is rated for low voltage so it's got the required radius edges you can pull cable on it on it this one's four inches obviously they make them a lot smaller - but we're gonna put these a series of these in along here and be able to clean up all of this cable spaghetti and then right here where where they feed down we're actually going to put in a couple of them facing this direction so that's you don't get what you see here where they start - banjo wire onion well here is an interesting bump in the road on this project and another good teachable moment so we had and during our time repairing and redoing the cabling in this business one of their phone lines went out so ran tone and it did not make it to the to the PBX system in the network room I did however start to read it as I came in through the subfloor and started waving around and what I found were these two punch down blocks these 266 blocks actually mounted up against this joist up high out of sight and that's what I'm gonna talk about that's why these were a bad idea no technician troubleshooting this in the future would have even guessed that they would have a rope strung in X 466 blocks now I understand what what was going on here these splices again these were cut cables from a previous system that needed to be reused but a straight splice would have been the smart thing to do and simply run them all the way to the the PBX system but the second thing that I need to tell you guys is this build your cabling as if you have to maintain it run your cabling as if you have to troubleshoot it I'm so often seeing a 66 block punch down exactly like this one absolutely unmaintainable they run their lines as straight as possible into this block no service loop nothing and weave it in and out of the base so this is never coming off to repair you'll never get this block back off of this frame after this and for instance this is a line that went bad and I can see here these are the pairs that broke off well good luck getting it more slack out of that looks like I'm gonna be stripping this back pulling some more out and doing a lot of extra work when you build these put in a service loop when you run these through make sure that you run them in such a way that you would be able to pull the panel that's why these have these clips here pull the 66 block off of the mounting frame build your systems as if you are going to be the one to maintain it to troubleshoot it to repair it and to upgrade it so here's where we stand after another long overnight stay and then some so all our data cables have now been in line spliced so all three patch panels in the subfloor here have been have been removed we're now working on cleaning up the cable runs and we're gonna have cable hangers all throughout this area and you all show you that better in a another shot here this was a surprise to find so now we've got these extra 66 blocks and so I think that whoever the technician was that put in patch panels for the data cables as an intermediary mass splicing device also used 66 blocks for voice line splicing in the building and I am going to strongly suggest that we do the same amount of splicing with this the problem being that these lines are assumed to be to a certain location but we don't know for certain what what happens at this point and this is simply another location where something can go wrong so I'm going to suggest that we also eliminate these 66 panels are 66 blocks in the subfloor as well the cabling that is left is the last of the cabling that runs diagonally up to the network room it's the last of the cabling that uses a conduit without edge guards so it would be in the best interests of the customer to have these these lines replaced and so that's what I'm going to suggest here is the beginnings of the structured cabling install what I've got here are J hangers 4-inch J hangers and what I'm doing is putting one in upside down here so that it doesn't banjo wire when it gets pulled diagonally you just make sure that the first one overlaps this so there's no chance of anything pulling out after that you can you can definitely run them at a lower level so this makes the cabling effort much much easier and not a big expense in reality all right it has been a grueling couple of days but our network here is getting more and more ideal more and more to the point that we'll be happy with it so this is the big deal it's taking a long time to get here a lot of different iterations a lot of test fitting a lot of trial and error and we've finally arrived at what we think will be the best configuration for this network at least for the time being and what we're doing is running the ubiquity switch 48 port with a 24 port above and below and a 6 inch patch cable this is is the ideal setup and compact simple easy to maintain the only downside as I have mentioned in other situations is the way that the ports are numbered on the ubiquity switches and this I believe is brand wide is one two three four five six so there's no ability to just run straight across by contrast this Linksys POS which does it exactly that way it runs one through twelve and then 13 to 24 down here not that it matters on this one so these guys are going straight to that's pili injector on the back wall and then I managed to use up some of my flat ribbon cable six-inch patch cables on this guy I got away with my particularly wide Keystone connectors because this patch panel is 32 port patch panel has a much wider space so at least I got to use up some of this equipment the nice thing also is that because the this camera system here was directly wired that being the the wall the inside the wall cabling came straight to the the switch that was here and the equipment that was here it still means that it's going to be trivial to convert these to these types of connectors so let's open this up and take a look at where we're sitting where we stand at this point so here you can see what the backs of these patch panels look like it's incredibly simple and I haven't tied down the strain reliefs on these because these still could've potentially get rearranged and moved as we comb these outs and because this is just a rj45 connection here it'll be very easy to pull and then untangle this line up above has been zip tied and most likely will not change this is the most slack I was able to get out of these lines and we're kind of stuck with that so most of these guys you'll see I've got a really really long amount of slack and the plan with these actual data patch panels is to actually run a kind of a loop before it goes down and that will provide two things one is the when this cabinet hinges open there'll be a lot of wiggle room an ability to move without stretching any cables the other thing is if I need to actually pull a patch panel away from the rack and let's say work on a table work on a table or something like that I will have that length to do it so we're gonna pull all of this as much as we can get a nice even and then a nice even surface loop and then we'll we'll dress that up so we're definitely as I've said in many of my videos getting near the finish line oh one other thing is this PDU so the the channels are numbered and this is and you've seen me install these in some other systems as well so this is a PDU with lighted switches so it'll give you the ability to label what this equipment is and then if we need to provide support to the customer that may not be tech savvy I can easily say something like well I need you to cycle the power on the modem well that might be easier to say is go to the rack look for switch number one and turn it off and then turn it back on again do you see light you know that of a thing so it makes it much more simple to support so I'm getting quite pleased with the the the spacing the the look I'll mention that I live left a three used space between these two systems and the reason for that is this 48 port panel or up switch is almost completely full now I think we've got just a couple of available ports so there's probably going to be an expansion and we would do the exact same thing as is done down here so we wouldn't we know we need at least another three u of space to stay kind of in this economic ideal area we're already working to still get this switch removed from the the system by giving us another available port on the CPE from our broadband provider and then we'll be replacing the modem with a u.s. G from also from ubiquity so we're getting there definitely getting everything cleaned up now what really cost us a lot of time today was in cabling and now you can see we've removed all these spare cables all the cables run in improper locations this is all that remains of the conduit here that has done edgeguard and as I mentioned earlier most likely all this is going to need to be removed as there are sixty six blocks in multiple places under the subfloor that should have just been splices but much cleaner here's another good example of installers putting in equipments and cabling that have never had to maintain or repair or troubleshoots that very cabling so these lines have been a run with exactly enough leg terminate in fact the twist goes all the way into the 66 block so good luck even pulling these out you're gonna wind up cutting these and pulling them out with the pliers you're not gonna pull these lines out and they go exactly straight up and over you're done even a line like this where there's a little bit of a loop just enough I could kind of see the line here as I pull it just a little bit extra so if I had to you know isolate this line test or whatnot I'm gonna have to cut this and I'm gonna lose some links I've got a little bit here but here's an example of what I like to do so I ran this guy to repair me get this out of the way - to repair a line that just was bad and all I had to do was go from from here to this spot here and this guy here so what I did is I ran down and up I mean this is free this doesn't cost you any more time this won't make your work ugly or somehow look messy you can do it cleanly this is this is cat 5 cable I mean it's easy to shape and everything so I ran down up and over to this guy down up across and see where I cut over made another loop and then went in mind you the most ideal scenario with these is to never have to do a connection like this where you have two wires two pairs meeting on one side ideally you have all of your equipment on one side and you have all the service going to it on another and you use a bridge clip in between that's so when you do need to test when you do need to you know separate the circuits and test in each direction all you're doing is pulling a clip and doing a test you're never pulling a wire and having to re crimp it or reap unch it down - to do it so ideally yeah this wouldn't even be like this but I'm limit what I've got to do here but these are some of the things I like to do because I might be the one coming back here Here I am now at the home stretch so all of my ports have been tested transferred to the new switch had a few issues with a few lines on the new patch panel or at least the new lines that were run got all those worked out and I'm very happy with with with where we're at at this point so it is now time for the final cable dressing and this is the tricky part so I now have all of the lines in and pretty much where I think they're going to be especially as they run down and over mind you all the splices at the far end are pretty much the same as this so it is a rj45 connector with a junction Keystone connection bringing the two together so if I have any major tangles further down there I can start that out pretty quickly underneath the floor so what I'm gonna do now is start to dress back all the cabling and my limiting factor right now is this bundle right here I've traced all these lines out this is the bundle as it runs right here and these are real tight so there's a few cables in here that pretty much determine how much slack I have in this rack because everything needs to follow the the shortest cable and so I'm probably gonna see if I can lengthen that cable under the floor with either adding a patch cable in between the the junctions or if the slack is available I just haven't found it but nonetheless what I'm gonna wind up doing now is dressing all the lines this way then I'm gonna have a nice service loop so I can take the panel out and work on it if I need to the two lines that come this way I've got some slack in that I can use so I'll have a decent service loop with that then I'm going to establish my service loop here or not necessarily a service loop as much as a flexibility joint so it's gonna make a loop like this and the whole point is to allow flexing whereas this cabinet opens and closes once I have my shortest cable a lengths established everything else will follow that same length so even though I have a ton of slack on this bundle here it doesn't matter if there's another bundle that's shorter so I that's what I'm gonna be doing and once this is finished I go to the far end and I dress the other way because right here at the corner and I got the cabling going under the floor it goes over this way and then over there to a splice and then actually in the opposite direction the same thing so I'm gonna dress back from the splice and all of my son even slack I'm gonna take up in the corner right there it's gonna be out of the way to one interfere with anyone who enters the area and it'll look that look real nice so that's where we're at at this point okay so here's actually what I've done so I've fished a cable through just a temporary pull cable you know push it through use the nice little access hole here to catch it on the other end and pull it through and then I've just tied a loop around the bundle I'm worried about so now I'm gonna pull this through and this will be able to allow me when I'm down underneath here identify all the cables I need to worry about finding slack for all right so so here is the other side of the conduit here is that pull string or a pull cable light I ran through the conduit so this is my bundle and I can already see that I definitely have some problems I mean it was it was difficult even getting this thing down and that's because one of the lines is tangled like this and now I might be able to comb this away higher up but I hopefully I'm not going to be able to with this so now what I get to do is push this line up disconnect it push it down untangle it and push it back up one of the nice advantages of having a Keystone patch panel is fixing these tangles super easy and quick and now I'm going to basically trace the rest of these guys on down the line that I've already started hanging and see if I can find some slack somewhere along the way if not this is going to be my shortest bundle and therefore all other Earth's will need to be of that length okay so we have sorted out the tangled cable that was afflicting of the bundle here I still have it isolated and now I've kind of separated it from the group and now it is a quest for slack so I'm gonna find out I'm gonna trace these lines out and find out which one it has the least amount available and see what I can do to it to maybe give it some more length and go from there because this is gonna ultimately determine just how far I can make all the others overhead so yeah this is the fun part this is when things start to come together all that planning and careful you know steps taken start to pay off right about here so what I found out is out of this bundle I've got what is it uh looks like three cables that I was able to get some more slack out of at least uh you know healthy amount this would be good and this was without working really too hard I found four lines that were really tight and I'm gonna take a look at that but I I may not pursue too much further for a couple of other options and then I found these two guys which turns out to be the ones that these offenders here see if I can show it to you that are still running diagonally across the area here this is the the only two bad lines so I I might actually wind up extending all of these now remember everything overhead in the rack is a rj45 connector it's done punch down it's just an RF j 45 connector male connector so if I need length on any of these lines really all I have to do is get a long jumper and another Junction connector and send on send the length right on down so considering how many lines I have to deal with here and and especially these two that are looked like they may need to be actually rerouted to get through all these obstacles the solution here is a pretty simple one I'm gonna just use a good collection of jumper cables and send all of this slack back down and this will not only give me the length I need but it'll give me the the junction connector is going to be down below the floor so I'll be able to unhook things to sort out any tangles that I'll run into so this will be the simplest way to do this it's another reason why you want to use rj45 in Keystone connectors as opposed to punch downs and patch panels gives you so much flexibility later on as you're working away of developing your structured cabling solution things evolve so in this case I've already decided that my corner here on this side as well as the corner on the other side this is going to be where I store my slack so I'm gonna have these long pools of cable down here at this location and the reason is I'm rarely in this corner so it's not going to inhibit anyone coming through needing to do work now these bundles here you see that were Clairol down these these were pulled back from one of the floors says some of the equipment that was removed and the cable this legacy cable was still there so I took it out and at the time we thought you know just dump it here but this is the spot where I step over to you know get out so I was constantly hitting these cables getting entangled in my feet and my belt and whatnot so you know give me the decision that you know what this is not where I'm gonna store this cable I'm gonna drag it all over to the corner and keep it here out of the way and because I'm using J hangers making that kind of a move is going to be trivial so I'm now at about halfway through cutting over these these lines here are these nine cables that need to get extended these are all surveillance cameras by the way in the in the network so I'm basically using just a bunch of these all matching I forget what the length is maybe 30 feet 20 feet something like that yeah maybe 20 feet maybe 15 I've got a bunch of these and these were all actually pulled from here these were the ones that went down to the patch panel under the ground so I had had these left over so I'm basically just pulling a line tying it in with a junction making sure that the clip is pointing away from the direction it's gonna get pulled someone do this all dying then I'm gonna send them down until I have the link that I want and by making this very basic a very quick change to my cabling I now have solved all of my slack issues so I have plenty of slack here I have plenty of slack in these lines down below so I'm going to now just dress these cables back however I want to whatever links and this this is proportions I'm totally set so yet another reason why these modular Keystone patch panels are a good idea okay with all of the jumpers run not these guys but all of these these nine jumpers run so so these lines are actually you know quite a bit longer now I sorted a bunch of stuff down whoa in the cabling area that was a tangled and now I'm ready to you know tie these guys back to the strain relief in and you know once again I can I can pull the patch panel off of the rack and I put I put a zip tie on both sides stick just cannot hold that strain relief in place but circuits are still live everything's still pretty much running as usual while I'm doing this cabling work I really like this so I'm gonna get all these secured I'm gonna dress everything to this side work on my loop for being able to pull this out again and then work out a loop down here for the the hinge points and that's my cable path then both of these patch panels will follow that distance wise and and go into one large bundle now that the strain relief has been a zip tied down cut flush best I could so make sure that this isn't gonna mess with anybody in the future which might be me so now this is secured I'm gonna start dressing this way because the bundle actually runs down this side of the the rack so now is when I can start dressing the cable pretty much similarly to how a 24 port IDC patch panel is where everything's kind of laid in order over each other and compact the difference is it doesn't sit back here on the back of the panel there's this there's this space where you can get a hand in there or a tool or a probe anything like that and you still get a nice compact cabling run like you're about to see so when I say I need enough slack to be able to pull a panel out it may not necessarily even mean that you know I need to pull it all the way over to here especially on a Keystone patch panel I don't really need to have the the panel sitting on a table where I'm punching it down and everything else but look what I'm able to do here so I'm still connected to this way you're going to see it that way I'm still connected my circuits are still alive but I've basically flipped the panel 180 degrees I've you know strung it up to hold in position so I can stand here and dress these cables back without without too much you know strain on my body and this is one things that I really think is wise to do with the panel's you do so these cables here these two lines which actually go up in a head are pretty much my limit but it's it's enough it's absolutely enough to to be able to do this and that's what I mean I'm going to definitely leave enough slack above here or around this panel to be able to do this again in the future when I have to for any additional work so here I have the patch panel dressed back and I like this I actually listen worked out that I had gaps in the tie downs because of the spacing of this that I gave me some perfect spots to to secure this it's going to be it's going to be interesting to see what I do or come up with for the 24 ports but we'll see anyways the the idea here now is I have the panel out I have it turned up and I have a cables dress back so these go in a you know up in a different direction but this is the important one so right where this is that it allows me to pull the panel out and and actually completely you know rotate it 180 degrees this is going to start to tell me where my cable slack needs to be so once I get this for the the top rack I'll have an idea of distance to leave for loops on the rest of these panels and just work my way down okay I'm gonna try to do this one-handed we'll see how it works so here is where I think I'm gonna need to secure this first bundle so this is the loop and this is gonna wind up getting what I call you know shapes so so right where the bundle leaves the last you know zip tie right here I'm gonna start shaping this cable so that there's a relatively sharp turn back so it's not you know pushing out this way like it's its tendency is going to be but once once this gets established it'll it'll with what I'm about to do will go a lot nicer but here's the the concept here so I have this patch panel basically just sitting on some screws but this is pretty much where it's gonna be I want to be able to unscrew this panel while it's connected rotate it 180 degrees and work on it and so that is the length I'm gonna need and this is the length that I'm going to now sense for the other two patch panels cuz they basically use the same strain relief even if there's more pairs so yep this is my next step so here's the first patch panel all dressed out you can see the type runs here keeps everything nice and compact this this loop can be tucked here or anything like that if new equipment goes in here and let's see how it works for servicing so if I wanted to maintain the sky I just go like so and voila I have a 180 degree rotational access to this pitch panel so that pleases me okay one patch panel done and I'm now moving on to the second one this is the full 24 port and again I'm grabbing enough slack here that I can basically unbolt the panel and rotate it 180 degrees to work on it really pretty much just it's standing height so you know ergonomically this is this makes sense on crouching over or sitting at a table and you just just work right here but uh the concept I want to get across here also is this is working equipment I mounted this patch panel and started connecting things immediately which is one thing I can do or another thing I can do with these Keystone connectors I could just plug right in if if things change or move around or get rearranged I can do that and have on this job several times because these are so modular so easy to disconnect and reconnect so I haven't done this dressing of the the wires until I was absolutely finished and knew that wasn't gonna make anymore major changes I still could wouldn't be a big deal just cut some zip ties and run it run new ones but the the the workflow process here is to get the customer up and running as soon as possible because I can do all of this later here is what I decided to do on the 24 port batch panel was this figure s and I'll show you why in a moment here but understand this distance doesn't take up any space I mean this whole plane is already occupied by that patch panel so having a lot of stuff in this spots is is completely fine now let's look at this so in in this earlier in this above case if you get swings outs works a little bit differently so so this this was fine but this one needs to do this and has to have a bit of flexibility so I've already unscrewed this so if I can do this one-handed so when it comes up let me try with the other hand so when it comes up you want to kind of clear this thing and then it has to clear this so you have to watch that corner and then kind of push it and then it can fall down so now I have access to the patch panel so this is the perfect length of cable I can I can zip tie this up and now I working area and notice that I did not zip tie around the bend for it to do this particular move so that it has flexibility in the curse okay I'm gonna try to shoot this in the selfie cam because of the cramps location so what I'm going to point out for you Alexa lots happened in the last few days of work here mainly with electrical and wound up having to build a bunch of or run a bunch of new circuits here that as it turns out were a result of the damage of having cables hanging on to conduit as you'll probably see a bunch of doing right here you may remember I got rid of a bunch of the guys that were actually sitting behind me so this particular conduit right here is one that comes down from above and up here's in this network room so it comes down and instead of running across this wall and actually finding studs like I did to to secure this it crossed over to the joist and ran through and now the problem with that is once it gets to here it has to go back and people have already run cables across and over and everything else so I'm actually going to cut this line I'm going to mount it to the wall here with a junction box similar this guy here I hope you can see that there it is and I'd be able to keep this separate from the data cable so wish me luck with that so we've installed these J hangers and run our slack all the way out similarly along the other side where the majority of the cables go so I can block the light here all the way around we've run J hangers and got a couple of strays here that I've yet to take care of but that'll be the final things a lot of structural work was done down here a lot of electrical ran some new circuitry to eliminate some of these crossovers so there used to be a conduit that crossed here and a lot of cables ran across it so that's now been wall-mounted this is the what used to be a lightness bar that ran down here a lot of the cables were hanging on so since that light bar isn't even used this has now been heree done this piping here has been supported from below now instead of from above which makes it easier for a technician to come in and out of here a lot of strapping relocated to allow for Headroom and and that sort of thing so a lot has been done here I might have not even mentioned it yet but this spot over here had this box here I think it's just the downward register for part of the HVAC system but this corner was extremely difficult to navigate so I built a wood frame around it to distribute the weight across the metal studs drop some plywood couple hours work but this now saves so much time and effort whenever we need to place in a new line or work at this cable head over here and similarly yeah only second block the glare similarly at the other side oh there's the cable head we've put plywood down to make accessing that area much simpler so all in all this area of the subfloor is now a completely different experience to work on here's a small example I wanted to point out here in just dealing with bad workmanship here is the hatch that is basically where I'm gonna be coming in and going out doing all this work back here and what you'll notice is it's not it's not fastened to this metal frame and you'll notice this all the way around now I've already started repairing this I want to show you one side of it way it was originally so basically when you put in a doorway in a metal steel stud frame to building you need to reinforce this and this was not done so actually as you climb in here and you grab this you're gonna wind up grabbing or some really sharp edges that are pretty pretty darn flimsy in fact the only thing holding this door in where the fasteners on the other side going into drywall and maybe the edge of these these boards I'm not sure so what I've been doing is filling in the gaps reinforcing with wood all the way around and then actually fastening through - to make this solid so when a technician climbs up here and reaches around he's gonna grab something solid that's not going to buckle it's not gonna cut him cut his hands or anything like that again you want to be accommodating to your technicians and this is not one of them all right so we're looking over ahead on our cable rack here and a rack cabinet and this is the the problem area I've been worried about this Scott since the beginning as far as how I'm going to protect the cabling and remove all of these burrs and what I've pretty much decided is I'm just gonna first of all I'm gonna enlarge in this opening so I'm gonna mark this out when I drill some holes here and here and cut to them and make this so much larger opening and then I'm gonna put on some edge guard I found at the heart store so wish me luck so here's the rough cut that I made around this opening and yeah it's not you know perfectly straight doesn't nascent necessarily have to be with what I'm about to do to it and to the way I did this I started with well I you know I drew some lines here and then I used this kind of Tillis is actually an electricians cutout tool hole saw really really sharp it blade on this guy cuts through this stuff like butter so I used that to to make these radius edges and then my favorite saber saw this thing has been so handy in such small areas so for instance like right here I was able to just you know put it on the edge here and just kind of dip that tip in to to make these cuts and this whole time leaving active circuits running actually the most of this is all phone lines but leaving all this running and that was able to make this cut so now I'm gonna edge treat this and I won't have to worry about this anymore now here's this opening above the the rack cabinet here with pretty much all the provisions I wanted to put in so good again this edge guard I've also mounted this angle bracket so that there'll be something to fix these guys to I'm gonna probably wind up putting something here to I piece of wood or something to put some cable ties to so this stuff will be nice and secure but yeah this is this is pretty much a good solution to a really gnarly problem let's take a look at it from underneath then you can really see the daylight coming through and how much better that the cables okay it's been a few weeks and I'm back here in the subfloor I wanted to show you kind of the final comb of these feeds and how much more simple it is now that everything has been sorted out however there was a pitch panel here and all kinds of mess going on here so yeah just two runs and here they go over to a vet corner and the slack is stored there run over the J hangers and same thing on the far side and you know cleverly use a chair to hide some of that too but yeah I'm here actually running a new line the customer requested a additional network drop and it was a super trivial thing to do now that this hole under the subfloor area has been cleared out simplified made space for for the technician to work and the thud here is not only is it convenient for me but as a customer you you want your and working environment for your technicians to be comfortable you want it to be the word is accommodating and because if a technician is comfortable here and is accommodated to do the work he'll do good work if it is uncomfortable he will do it as quickly as possible and get the hell out so make your workspaces accommodating to your technicians so I am very proud of the result and the transformation of this subfloor area ladies and gentlemen this is the final product it's been a long road to get here a lot of sleepless nights a lot of sacrifice a lot of frustration but we're here we've eliminated a whole slew of network equipment that was here strewn out all around is actually this whole box is full of switches and network devices that we've removed from this site we've also cleaned up in here mopped the floor mount clean the tables removed all the abandoned cabling cleaned up a lot of the wiring labeled our guitar cables added a cable another board up here to run our cables off before I open this let me just show you this we this is a new receptacle we found out that these guys weren't grounded so got that repaired all of the cables that used to run along the floor have been removed this is all that remains and like I've mentioned this bundle right here is analog phone lines for the PBX system that most definitely will be replaced eminently okay you're ready for this guys here we go voila probably the most important thing you haven't seen yet is I've identified my circuits on the the PDU up front top and at the moment our UST router has not been activated yet we're not ready to move over to that so I've got a couple of items that I've identified basically as temp mainly because these soon will go away and we won't use them that's why I put them on on the far side here so I'm going to start at the bottom so we have now a UPS that is controlling all this equipments I added a narrow shelf I believe this is only eight inches deep and managed to secure our USC router and this Netgear switch but all of this is going to go away even the Asus router I added this bar right here to secure the cabling and I'll show you a little bit more of that when I go to the back I've labeled the patch pals P and B I really regrets choosing B as my lettering and not real that P was being used I probably would have used maybe a something that didn't rhyme with P oh well and so yeah you can see the patch panels my favorite kind with plenty of slack here we've got the security camera system and we're hoping to soon be able to switch over to LAN two and then eliminate the nectar switch okay let's open the back because there's a lot of work done in the back I haven't really documented yet oh look at that isn't that beautiful so this is the the main thing that I haven't really shown yet and so I've got three patch panels three bundles coming down and I wanted to create a nice flexible loop that's not secured to anything so it stops here and doesn't get secured again till the back of this board here that doesn't even move and that way when this thing opens and closes there's a nice flexible curve in the cabling - to handle that motion so everything's been secured now power has been secured everything that needs to be tied down permanently has been I mounted our the power brick with just a nice strap to keep it keep it secured I've already mentioned this but I managed to clean up that abomination of a opening there that clearly in danger of destroying a bunch of cables and got this all nice and secured and dressed out the analog phone line run that I'm not even happy runs through this cabinet I cleaned that up a little bit at least got everything together so this is now a drastically simplified Network there's no mess there's no tangles power on one side data on the other data along the the hinge points everything coming through one opening that has edge guard all around so this really is the conclusion of probably the first time that I have been just unleashed to do what I think ought to be done when it needs to be done right and yeah I understand that there you're not going to always have this kind of situation just unlimited time carte blanche for what I think needs to be done plenty of Rackspace so I'm making sure I have 3u of space between my equipment so I can flip these patch panels out and without interfering you're not always gonna have these advantages you're not always going to have these scenarios so this may not always apply to your project but I will say that I am imagining that some of this can inspire you some of this can give you ideas I hope it does I've been very pleased to see this through and I hope you have been too

Channel: FiberNinja

Views: 1,675,199

Rating: 4.829133 out of 5

Keywords: network, ethernet, cabling, rebuild

Id: amdfzcqaTIQ

Length: 126min 17sec (7577 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 26 2017