Yep...it's real

Fixed it !

Is this chair for torture?

You young IT guys see chaos here.... us old IT guys see Job security.

My worst job. At a hospital no less.

I can testify that I’ve had to deal with network and servers that look like that. And they wonder why their connections suck. I make them look like this.

Ok, true story time. At some point the company I worked for decided its future lay in a different direction and sold off one of its two major businesses to a competitor. I, the Senior I.T. Guy, went with the sale. They looked at it as an opportunity to get rid of that pesky Unix guy and his Unix machines. (Side note: that company is long gone. The company to which I and my Unix machines were sold has prospered.) I was immediately made Senior I.T. Guy at my new employer because they hadn’t previously had an honest-to-God I.T. geek running things. They’d mostly been winging it and occasionally hiring a consultant. Eventually I made it down to Corporate HQ. Their “network room” looked a lot like that—only on a much, much smaller scale. That was the moment I understood why they’d instantly made me head of I.T. with no ceremony.

True story: I was an SE at GE and got called to the Sallie Mae call center in Killeen, TX (now closed). They were having random network drop-offs. I opened the MDF door and every Cat-5 cable was skinned, pairs untwisted, run down an A-frame, and punched down to 110 blocks (like old telephone wiring). I looked at the guy and said, “Who did that?” He replied, “A company called Power and Data.” I facepalmed, took my Fluke, plugged it in, hit the noise meter—and it pegged. I left laughing.

i get to play with shit like this sometimes at work i do my best work one handed in the dark

Just do it!

import the 3rd world into your IT org and it becomes the 3rd world

Your task: Clean up the cabling with only one second of downtime per port.

Job security. Nobody else wants to touch that.

Tesla has a different approach.

"I quit"

Now slowly and carefully back out and don't touch anything

I’m sending this to a friend. His eye will immediately start twitching. I may get slapped. Wish me luck 😂

On the upside, that mangled rats nest of cables will reduce the likelihood of magnetic interference and signal distortion. The messier the better. Counterintuitive, I know.

I showed this to the graveyard IT guy and his eye started twitching and now he can't speak.

Much better ...

I can vouch that the IT cabinets are 100% genuine and likely 100% live with no redundancy and housing a domain with 35,000 users. I fixed that shit for a living for 30 years.

You get what you pay for Cable management at its worst there’s a stack behind those cables that belonged to the Dept of Labor in Juneau Alaska

@ProfPlaguebat OH. MY. GOD! I’ve cleaned up a data closet that looked like this but with fewer racks than this one. It took days to trace all the cables and create a port map and then about a day to “rip and tear” and then rewire with all new patch cables.

Perfect physical manifestation and illustration of technical debt.

I'll see your WTF and raise it !

what's the chair for, just to watch?

I've seen similar behind the control panel of a 2MW induction heated chem reactor except that all the snakes were mostly copper tubing for the pneumatic controls intertwined with some "modern" electronic control cabling. Lots of "abandoned in place"...

I have been in somewhat similar nightmares...

Ya that is probably 70% of company server rooms. It always starts out looking nice.... Unless you are willing to pay monocable a $2000 for hundreds of 6", 1', 3', 5', 6', 8' cables. That is the only way I have managed to keep a server room from ending up like this.

Could you imagine the wiring diagrams and the CMDB