Cabling Peeves

Consider this a "Before" post for an upcoming weekend project I'll have to do. Traditionally that's what the Thanksgiving long weekend is for.

I'm a big believer in having relatively tidy cabling. There's definitely just masses of wires in my life. But if you have a solid base of sanely cable managed stuff it makes it pretty easy to just tidy up the important stuff and brush all the random knots of cables into a drawer because if they mattered they'd be cable managed.

Part of this is the cabling in my racks. A super important feature to me is that I keep these tidy enough that I can just roll them out into the room and clean stuff, cable in new stuff. I'm not crazy about it, they're not super cable managed and tidy, but nothing's plugged in "just for now".

So what I need to do is mount a patch panel for all that shit to plug into. The runs from the patch panel to the switch will then be all uniform, same color, and I can custom make these to length. I'll probably just have like n+2 of these patched in.

What this is going to do is eliminate a lot of the wiring between the racks. Right now I just feed a bunch of stuff through the hole and into the switching rack. Network for my main workstation, then a couple that I use for Wireshark and alternate VLANs and another for a serial cable going to my Avocent for remote console access to the workstation. There are other things in that rack too like my work laptop and retro PCs.

Of course these two 30' HDMI cables aren't doing anyone any favors either. Those things are the size of your finger.