this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
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To be honest, I've seen commercial 7' racks in data centres and computer rooms that were worse than the worst ones here!

I was once tasked with rejigging 3 racks in a remote computer room. The racks were arranged in an "L" pattern due to the constraints of the room. None of the doors - front or back - could close because of cables running between servers and switches. Some cables actually ran diagonally across the L shape. A lot of cables were jammed between the mounting rails, and 3 metre cables were used where a 50cm one would have done, or 2 metre ones where a 3 meter or more was needed. Almost nothing was labelled, and where it was, it was wrong. The cable colour coding scheme was ignored, and nothing was recorded. There were servers racked on a slant - TWO nuts off on one side - and even mounted back-to-front. Others were literally sat directly on top of other kit, not bolted in at all. RAID arrays for critical servers were mounted in adjacent racks, with the cables running around the opened rear rack door, and there were a number of suspicious, unmarked servers, of odd brands that were hooked into the main switch, that nobody could identify. One turned out to be an abandoned Nagios server, but one was never identified, and nothing broke, nobody screamed when I turned it off.

Just about all the horrible things you have seen or heard about were in that room. It took weeks to sort it out.

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[–] SteveTech@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Usually if they're all managed switches, you can look at the MAC table and map things out that way.

[–] Alvaro@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

Yeah, but not if the cable died and the port has been down for long enough that the last MAC was already cleared and there is no historic logs 🙃