Always take a photograph before you start.

Photos don't help.

YOU ENTER THE ROOM AND DISCOVER A MAZE OF LITTLE TWISTING PATCH CABLES, ALL IDENTICAL.

This is why the gawd/ess(es) invented multicolo(u)r fine-point Sharpies.

Photos can help - the cables may all look the same and be untraceable, but if you can identify which ports were in use and compare to which are currently in use hopefully there will be a difference of 1. Failing that, it at least helps you narrow down the possibilities.

And you always spent 5 min with some tape and pen, and label those random patch leads. That 5 mins can save an hour of panic later

Never get out of the boat. Absolutely goddamn right, unless you were going all the way...

This is an excellent rule, but one that would have been inapplicable for the part of my tech career that involved pulling cables around--this was the years BCE (Before Cellphone Era). To be fair, a Polaroid camera would have worked, but I never saw one used.

I do remember a long-distance conversation with a customer who had unplugged, then re-plugged wrong. Well, I drew a picture, the customer said. I guess that she could have faxed it to me, but I don't see how that would have helped.

At the (long ago) point in my career when I was plugging boxes in, there were two rules we had to follow:

1) The ops team would not accept a box into service without photos of the front and back, showing the location of all cables.

2) No cameras in the datacentres.

I now use the camera on my phone to take photos of everything before and during any disassembly/disconnection of anything (even the "simple" things). Thankfully I don't have these automatically uploading to a social media account as it would probably only reinforce my family's opinion of me.......

I do the same ... Google automatically copies the photos to the cloud and every so often on my phone I get a "remember the day" alert from photos reminding me of what I was doing the previous year, "on a random Thursday", etc ... their AI hasn't yet managed to collate them in to a "plugs and cables" slideshow yet but I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually did!

The guy (it's always a guy...) who thinks everything can be fixed via a CLI.

But when they just physically broke something? That's a pretty extreme example!

Um, I think that, these days, there are less and less offices who have anyone who even knows what CLI means.

And I suspect that, the further in time we advance, the more that will be true, even in IT offices.

fewer and fewer

/pedant

fewer doing less CLI

fewer CLI doing less

Those who know the difference between fewer and lesser are fewer, but those who don't are lesser.

Brain exploding ===>

Fewer - not as many

Less - not as much

Easy

Sometimes I have to ask a non-technical client to run a debug command on the command line and redirect the output to a file. I fully understand that they might not grok that greater-than output.log writes to output.log. I was, however, surprised yesterday when I had to explain this to our first-line support guy.

If you're really "lucky", that guy insists on "automating" those CLI commands in a .bat that is totally unreadable.

just need a text editor that colours the code.

That instantly makes all languages readable.

I would not entertain looking at a bat in notepad.exe unless lives depended on it

"But when they just physically broke something?"

An unplugged cable is not b0Rken.

The connection is broken, though.

Back in the days I was working on VME bus hardware, I hated my boss for making me go through the entire chassis, noting down the position of every single DIL switch, jumper & board position before we shipped the kit out.

When we had to swap out a dual port SCSI interface at nearly midnight on the client site, under time pressure and whilst not entirely sure it was a card fault anyway, I was extremely grateful for being able to do a like-for-like, confident that I wasn't introducing an unknown.

Documentation: the hallmark of civilised society ;)

Documentation: the hallmark of civilised society ;)

and promptly ignored by the (un) civilized.

Documentation: the hallmark of civilised society ;)

In my experience, removed from scope by management because they see it as a burdensome overhead that they don't want to use their budget towards

Will save the day more often than not. I have always found it useful to label the cable and backplane as you go to prevent hours and hours of “fun” (and by fun I mean really putting the FU back into it).

If only everyone had your common sense. When you are back to trying combinations of things to bring back someone else's systems (especially if that someone else was a younger version of yourself) always remember that in real life stressful situations there is always at least one more combination of things you can plug in then is mathematically possible - all the theoretical combinations plus the final one that works (think USB-A superposition).

> USB-A superposition

That's when the USB fits snugly into the ethernet port, right?

Not quite.

It's also sometimes called [1]Schrodinger's USB

[1] https://global.discourse-cdn.com/boingboing/original/4X/9/6/3/963247bf0e92b25e4b484f8be589297f502f7d42.png

> what to do at 5:00PM Friday

In my experience working for a *nix systems supplier, 4:55 on a Friday was the time the phone would ring. On the other end would be panicking techy from one of our OEMs who had spent most of the week trying to set up a system for a client demonstration first thing on Monday morning.

They would alway expect us to bail them out, after a week of failure and demands (from their sales rep - sorry: account manager, as they continually reminded us) that we do everything possible to get them working. Including spending the weekend fixing the mess they had got into. Whether we had plans of our own, or not.

Needless to say, none of the management, nor the sales droid (who stood to gain a substantial commission) felt the need for their presence while we toiled. Nor the need to even acknowledge the personal sacrifices made.

As a consequence, all our team would often find themselves engaged in a conference call from about 4p.m. onwards. Discussing the weather, what we were doing on Saturday, where to go for Friday evening drinks and all the other burning issues of the day, that are necessary for a well balanced working experience.

Afterwards did you LABEL the cables?

If not, shame on you ;)

My other half finds it annoying that I use a sharpie to write on the back of all the mains plugs to identify what's connected to the other end.

> My other half finds it annoying that I use a sharpie to write on the back of all the mains plugs to identify what's connected to the other end.

See, another reason why the UK 3-pin plug is so much better - plenty of space for a label!

[1]https://www.fastcompany.com/3032807/why-england-has-the-best-wall-sockets-on-earth

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3032807/why-england-has-the-best-wall-sockets-on-earth

Amateur!

I use a label maker

"why-england-has-the-best-wall-sockets-on-earth"

There seems to to be many youtube videos on this subject . Its one of those things the British seem to be irrationally proud of for no good reason.

I usually use a small sticky label to do the same thing. Makes life so much easier!

I use a small zip-tie flag and Sharpie. Even easier, and doesn't get ruined when young Biff or Buffy manages to spill their sippycup onto it.

The form over function battle with the Sharpie..........

Many years ago, a group of us were overnighting at a friend's house. One was looking for a socket to plug in his cassette player (yes, it was that long ago).

Finding a seemingly "useless" plug, he removed it, and left it out overnight.

It was the greenhouse heater (other side of wall) , supposedly protecting a crop of that year's geraniums from a very chilly night.

A very glum look was on the face of the friend's mum later the next day.

Such was the importance of that WAN that Nina's boss came into the hot aisle and did the deed.

Which was what the job required – but also a problem. Because neither Nina nor the boss noted which port the WAN cable had been connected to.

Very important job! takes two people to ensure done correctly - like a code commit needing approval.

Not important enough to note basic shit like where you unplugged the wire from though?