My first real IT job was doing all the grunt work (and whatever sysadmin tasks I could talk the greybeards into trusting the new kid with) in our two DCs, one a

My first real IT job was doing all the grunt work (and whatever sysadmin tasks I could talk the greybeards into trusting the new kid with) in our two DCs, one at the corporate office and the other at our manufacturing plant. Our DC at the corporate office was OK aside from the patch panel which was a fucking mess, that and when they originally built the thing however long ago they installed the switches at the top of the racks BACKWARDS so the ports where at the FRONT of the rack instead of the back with the server ports and they just ran with it instead of taking 20 minutes to flip them around, so instead of neat orderly cables going up and down between the ports you had these giant bundles on either side of the servers going from front to back I had to unbind and untangle anytime one needed replacing >.> This[0] is the what I managed to get our patch panels there reduced too and slightly cleaned too after removing all of these[1] cables that were still plugged into dead ports that my predecessor just never bothered to take out after retiring or recabling servers that had been on the other end. I'm 99% sure he was just running new cables and configuring a new port anytime someone called to complain about an unreachable server instead of trying to find the other end of the relevant cable. [0] - https://i.imgur.com/PIPhAal.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/PIPhAal.jpeg [1] - https://i.imgur.com/PIPhAal.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/PIPhAal.jpeg Wish I still had some pictures of the plant DC though because holy cow it was even worse, no patch panels anywhere, but they did have a drop floor so I could pull the tiles up and run cables down there if I was so inclined. My predecessor, not so much. He seemed to prefer running them between the tops of the racks, with random cables crisscrossing above your head, always drooping down and getting snagged on the step ladder as I carried it between racks, or getting caught in the doors constantly. And they would never let us have any downtime to clean up the cabling, nor could I talk them into just switching the network configs to use a different damn port on the actual servers so I could just run new fucking cables ;_; I had to settle for obsessively tracing and labeling each end of the cable with the port# and device that was on the other end of the cable, because otherwise every call about checking on a server turned into an hour of either tracing cables either under the floor, pulling tiles one by one to follow it to the other end, or a jungle safari sorting through the tangled mess of cables on top of the racks following the one in question as it arced over multiple aisles to it's final destination. Which of course I had to do anyways to get them all labeled, but at least this way I only had to do it once and it was done forever. Good times.