Hello everyone and welcome back! This week I'm going to be talking about cable management, which is extremely important in maintaining your network and a full head of hair.
The leading cause of baldness in IT professionals. Source.
Having a setup like the one above can make troubleshooting at best a nightmare and at worst
nearly impossible. Let's look at some ways to keep this from happening.
First of all, there are a multitude of options for cable management hardware, pieces that attach to the rack to hold cables in place such as finger boxes and plastic D-rings, like the ones shown below.
To make things even easier on yourself and other techs, you can use different colors of cables to differentiate between departments of functions, mirroring the physical or logical layout of the network, whichever is most efficient for your situation. Documentation is extremely important, and each patch cable and connection to the component should be labeled on both sides, and diagrams should be made of all connections and signal paths. And as always, try to future proof the system by allowing room for expansion. This way, anyone assigned to work on the setup can do so with relative ease. I've attached a short YouTube video featuring a man in a lab coat going over some cabling best practices, and a basic re-cabling of a messy switch. See you next week!
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