Was this meant to be a comment on https://piefed.ca/c/selfhosted/p/648232/alright-let-s-see-pictures-of-your-super-nice-rack-mounted-professionally-installed-labs-i ?
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2026
17 points (90.5% liked)
Selfhosted
58433 readers
191 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
-
No low-effort posts. This is subjective and will largely be determined by the community member reports.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I had a car dealership I was to add new servers into a new rack and recable it. I walked into a room with about half a dozen servers balanced on a pile of cat5, BNC and serial cables about 4' high. I spent 3 weeks untangling cables, removing dead cable, decommissioning serial and token ring networks and re-terminating or re-running ethernet that didn't test well.
Pretty much everything was done by scream test because nothing was marked. I found an ancient server that was still used for manuals occasionally that was drywalled into a old closet in the shop when I traced down a line I disconnected and one of the mechanics asked where his manuals had gotten to. That server was shut down every night when they turned off the shop lights and booted back up every morning for who knows how many years when someone came in to work and turned on the lights.
I eventually got to the point I could set up my rack and SANs/servers, patch everything over from the network rack I mounted on the wall, and get guys going on the workstations.
We had a series of meetings after that with the sales team about getting a technical appraisal before we sold our equipment into dealerships. And every dealership I worked in after that was pretty similiar.
Honestly, it was an amazingly satisfying feeling at the end to look in that room after I was done. I get a little shiver 20 years later thinking about it now.
Favorite I've had was a switch just sitting on the panels of a drop ceiling. Wasn't documented that's where it was either. I spent an hour or so hunting around a department when somebody mentioned, "there's that tech thing in the ceiling".
My worst rack experience was at an office I did IT in, the networking closet had 3 racks and like 20 switches/routers, each one with almost all the ports in use.
There. Was. No. Cable. Management. None...
Everytime someone changed something over the years, they would grab the nearest cable and connect it however they wanted.
You literally had to craw between cables and follow them with your hand from one port to the other as there was no other way to find what went where.
I'm talking 10-15 minutes to switch a cable from two switches on the same rack.
I once spent 2 hours mapping out where 1(!) endpoint was connected because the cable died (they were all basically trash) and there was no mapping so I had to use a line tracer (tone generator)
Usually if they're all managed switches, you can look at the MAC table and map things out that way.
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 🙃