Cunningly camouflaged cable routed around WAN-sized hole in project budget
- Reference: 1685691066
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/06/02/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as "Leif" who, back in the day, was given quite a challenge: a vendor's European office expanded into an adjacent office building, but the move would take months – and the network in both buildings needed to be connected throughout, and keep working within the buildings they served.
This was not a straightforward job. In the original office was an ageing Token-Ring network that served an AS 400, and in the new one was shiny new Cisco kit.
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At this point readers may be wondering why Leif didn't just order a WAN connection and be done with it.
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Leif investigated just such a connection. "But as with many projects during this time, the timeline goalposts were not just mobile but motorized, and no definitive costing could be obtained," he told On Call.
So while a WAN was an obvious answer, open questions about money meant it wasn't an option.
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Leif and his fellow techies therefore hatched a plan. The buildings were so close together – with trees between the two facilities – surely it would not be hard to just throw an ethernet cable from one to the other?
[5]That old box of tech junk you should probably throw out saves a warehouse
[6]Cheapest, oldest, slowest part fixed very modern Mac
[7]Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun
[8]Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM
While this solution was crude, and risky, two factors made it seem feasible: spring was imminent, and green Ethernet cable was available. Leif and his colleagues thought they could string the cable through the trees, and nature would take its course to provide camouflage.
Their rickety fix would therefore do the job and nobody outside IT would ever notice.
"The IT department stayed late one evening to perform some 'system maintenance' and got to work," Leif told On Call. "String and cable were weighted, thrown, taped and pulled and by Monday morning we had a working IBM >Cisco network, with a Token-Ring to Ethernet Bridging switch making it all possible.
"Backs were slapped, congratulations were handed out all round, there may have even been an employee appreciation gift card or two given out," Leif wrote.
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The team even gave this rig a name: "Wireline Bridging."
And the plan worked. Long before the leaves fell later in the year, the office move was complete, and the camouflaged cable was coiled and stowed without anyone being the wiser about trees having made the migration possible.
Have you hidden cables to make networks go places they shouldn't? If so, [10]click here to send On Call an email and your story might bloom here on a future Friday. ®
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/26/on_call/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/19/on_call/
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Spanning Tree
Oh, well played sir, very well played.
Sir: this icon is for you, bloody brilliant!
But how did they ensure no-one gained root access?
You, sir, should not be getting your coat. There are too many pints left un-drunk on ytour table; here is another one for the road.
spanning tree!
Shirly there were wome banyan vines involved as well.
Apologies for the blatant bandwagon jumping.
Radia's spinning.
Have a beer.
Re: Radia's spinning.
> Radia's spinning.
Not dead yet, surely?
Spanning Tree
Well played Sir, very well played.
I did once experience the reverse scenario - a wireless ethernet bridge between two buildings, which had degraded into unusability. Only after travelling to the site to investigate did it become clear that where there had once been a small tree, a larger one had just come into leaf :-)
We had a similar one: Wireless Ethernet between buildings that got interrupted every Tuesday morning. When the car dealership across the road took delivery of new vehicles, and the transporter parked in the middle of the road to unload.
So can we say this was a migrating cable, that took nest in the trees for the spring, before leaving at the end of summer?
What is the carrying capacity of a migrating European Swallow Ethernet cable?
Now that's what I call Windows networking!
-- funnily enough I'm pretty sure "Leif"'s vendor used his approach in the rest of their business after the early 90s.
Did something similar....
But with an armoured fibre and jackhammer between our office and the basement of a grade 1 listed next door. The noise off Marylebone Road provided cover..... [shame]
Back in 80's I was working in an office block in the city centre. A fairly senior member of staff moved office from something like 5th floor north-east corner to 2nd floor south-west corner. For some reason the building management couldn't reconfigure the internal phone system/switchboard to shift his telephone extension to the new office, and it was going to take ages / cost a fortune to get an engineer to come and look at it.
The building manager dispatched me to the nearby British Telecom shop (something of a novelty, as this had just opened as part of the post-privatisation activities) with a wad of cash to buy a load of the longest telephone extension cables I could find.
I returned with the goods and an insanely long extension was plugged together, using copious amounts of sparky's tape around each connection, and strung around the outside of the building.
Must have been close to the limit of maximum practical length, but it did the trick.
Over the years ...
... I can't count the number of lasers I've used to make connections between buildings. Across cities, occasionally ... and across San Francisco Bay a handful of times.
That's modulating the beams, not cutting holes ...
Weather?
A previous employer had a customer whose network would come to a shuddering stop whenever the weather froze - especially the first one of winter!
I also remember being told how I should string ethernet cables outdoors in case they got hit by lightning. That never happened but I do remember one that ended up running through a beehive! The cable was there first but nobody thought to tell the bees that they couldn't live there...
So they just implemented a Spanning Tree protocol?