​How well does that tape work?

Not very well judging from this second photo. It seems the tape has loosened its grip–did a wire go with it?

Cameron, here’s hoping you didn’t spend too much time trying to resolve someone’s bad connection!

Leaky lavatory liquidates LAN

This hole-in-the-wall is courtesy of office manager Valerie. She says that a leak in a bathroom pipe caused the ceiling above their server room to collapse. As a small non-profit the funds to fix it simple haven’t been there.

​Finding a fix

The leak was quickly repaired, but that hasn’t completely put Valerie at ease. “Our Maine ingenuity found this to be a reasonable fix,” she said. Here’s hoping that umbrella won’t be needed!

​Purposeless machines

IT consultant Joseph did a relocation for this client, and what he found was definitely a nightmare.

The previous IT team that ran this wreck of racks had virtualized most of the equipment into just five servers and a few switches. Did they document their work? Nope. Joseph was forced to contend with all this equipment and no way to tell what was what.

​QA department to the server room!

It looks like the team Joseph took over for was a little less than diligent about keeping things in order outside the racks too. Holes in the wall, junk on the floor, and guess what? Most of those red cables were cut!

​Hotel Hell, server room edition

Andrew works for an over-the-air broadband provider. His company landed a contract with a hotel chain, and Andrew was sent on site to install a Cisco switch to cap the bandwidth.

Maintenance took him to the boiler room on the top floor, which was where the telecom was stored. Here’s what he found. Hopefully the hotel was small!

​Waterfall of wires

Scott was at this job site last week and had to deal with an overseas IT team along with this mess.

At least the elevated floor tiles look nice?

​A guttural reaction

It’s a bit hard to see what’s going on under that tarp–Brian sends us this photo from the aftermath of a backed up gutter, too much rain, and ventilation pipes in just the wrong place.

​Putting the servers out to dry

Once the water stopped flowing Brian and team dried out the servers using box fans. Their IT systems were only down overnight–pretty impressive!

​Don't judge a server by the front of the rack

Davi looks to have the perfect server room at his client site, doesn’t he? Everything is grouped and wrapped nicely, there’s not an errant wire in sight, and those wires on the left are actually bundled!

Not so fast.

​What horrors lurk beneath the surface

Here’s where, in Davi’s words, “the magic happens.” The back ends of the racks are a mess, with wires hanging everywhere, bundled on the floor, and sticking out of holes in the wall.

Looks like someone else was just trying to impress the boss by sweeping the mess under the rug.

Server/storage room

Davi’s client also seems to think the server room is a catch-all space for whatever junk needs to be forgotten about.

Stay sane, Davi!

​Patch leads? Who needs 'em!

Marino’s nightmare comes from a comms room that saw too much expansion and too many hands.

What started as a small room with a single network grew out of control as several other groups moved in. With no central control, no oversight, and no desire to think of everyone else the cables grew up like weeds.

Marino also says there wasn’t a single patch lead in the entire jumble.

​Invest for success

This is still Marino’s server room–hard to tell, isn’t it?

With a small investment in time, money, and a complete strip down the server room was transformed into what you see here. “It’s not perfect,” Marino says, “but it’s serviceable.”

I think it looks pretty darn good!

​Keep those network admins out of my closet!

Mark brings us this brutal example of rack management with just a short description:

“This is what happens when you let the network admin staff do their own wiring.”

Good luck out there, Mark.