--- streiner@cluebyfour.org wrote: -------------
Note that telcos are not immune to shoddy cabling/installation work.
<snip>
Scott Weeks wrote:
--- streiner@cluebyfour.org wrote: -------------
From: "Justin M. Streiner" <streiner@cluebyfour.org>Note that telcos are not immune to shoddy cabling/installation work.
<snip>
http://www.cluebyfour.org/~streiner/mbr-pop-2000-ladder.JPG
----------------------------------------------------Do that at the telco in Hawaii and you won't be working here very long.
The installation work and wiring here is something to swoon over.
One of the stranger things a field tech of ours encountered wasn't necessarily bad wiring (although it's not great), but the fact that the demarc was located next to the toilet in the bathroom. Naturally, the constant humidity caused bad corrosion problems and other issues with their telco services. 
So as a general rule of thumb, avoid putting your telco and/or network gear next to the crapper or the services the equipment is meant to provide might also stink.
Vinny Abello wrote:
One of the stranger things a field tech of ours encountered wasn't necessarily bad wiring (although it's not great), but the fact that the demarc was located next to the toilet in the bathroom. Naturally, the constant humidity caused bad corrosion problems and other issues with their telco services.
On the plus side, they didn't have to go far for a ground.
I know of one ISP that had their local POP in a small rural town, the bathroom of a local store, sitting on a shelf in rather close proximity to the sink (Sorry don't have pictures). So Router, modem bank and a couple T1's. The kicker was they had it all plugged into an extension cord that ran to another part of a back room. More than 1 time we (as the local telco) had to go out there cause they where certain it was a problem with the Ts, When in fact someone had either tripped over the power cord or unplugged it somehow.
-Patrick
We used to have a POP under somebodys stairs in Bristol in the UK and
another POP in the loft of a friend of one of the employees. They sold
their house and the POP stayed there and the new owners knew nothing
about it, imagine their surprise when a telco engineer turned up wanting
to fix a fibre fault 
One of the places where I worked had a bunch of networking gear and around 12x1U servers all squeezed into a shower stall.... There was a cardboard sign hanging from the faucet saying "WARNING!!! Do not turn on"
W
I have more than once encountered a grounding wire securely fastened to
a 4" wastewater pipe, totally oblivious to the fact it wasn't cast iron but PVC.
To be sure, the National Electrical Code only permits pipe grounds
within five feet of the building entrance, because of concerns about
plastic pipe use along the route. That said, you seem to have
encountered people with their clue bit solidly pulled by ground to 0...
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Well, this one time, at band-camp ....
Blake Pfankuch wrote:
Not too far from the dial POP I mentioned in my last post, was another dial/T1 POP in northwestern Maryland. Prior to our acquisition of the company that originally built the POP, it was located in two rooms of the basement of a 200-ish year old homestead in the area.
That wasn't the problem - structurally, the building was perfectly fine. The only problem specific to the building was a total lack of cooling in the basement. Several racks of routers, servers, and telco gear throw off lots of heat, so the temperature in that room was never below 95 degrees even in the dead of winter. There were also some well-fed cockroaches, who would occasionally help us move equipment. My only conern with them was that they'd threaten to unionize and lobby for better working conditions 
http://www.cluebyfour.org/~streiner/hgr-pop-2000-roaches.JPG
The telco demarc for the T1s. The bread racks holding the routers and dial gear would be just to the left of this view. You can see some of the spider web wiring peeking out from the beams above.
http://www.cluebyfour.org/~streiner/hgr-pop-2000-far-end.JPG
More telco gear in another part of the basement. Yes, the muxes are wrapped in plastic, apparently to keep the dust off of them
http://www.cluebyfour.org/~streiner/hgr-pop-2000-separate-telco-room.JPG
The problem was the installation work done by some of the people who worked for the company we acquired. T1 blocks were on one wall and the routers were in the opposite corner of the room - total distance was about 30-35 feet if the wiring was done 'the right way'. The solution I found they used was to buy a bunch of 100-foot Cat5 jumpers and loop the excess length back and forth on itself, cinch it all together with zip ties (bend radius recommendations be damned) then anchor the whole mess to one of the ceiling beams with a staple gun. Multiply that by 20-ish T1s and the ceiling turned into a spider web very quickly. Power distribution was also very interesting. It consisted of a piece of Romex pulled from a nearby electrical panel to a string of household duplex outlet boxes nailed to a 2x4. Somewhere in the mess of wiring for that beast, it appears that the maker never bothered to test for a good ground...
jms
Thats an understatement. A 0 in one ground is a 1 at another..
Adrian
I have more than once encountered a grounding wire securely fastened to
a 4" wastewater pipe, totally oblivious to the fact it wasn't cast iron but PVC.
> I have more than once encountered a grounding wire securely fastened
to
> a 4" wastewater pipe, totally oblivious to the fact it wasn't cast
iron but PVC.
I noticed similar strip down the side of the Doges Palace in Venice. The
metal of choice, however, left a lovely rust stain in the priceless
marble, however. At least they did it on a wall facing an alley.
-joe
Alright, this is all scary familiar and bringing back bad memories.
Wooden modem racks, POPs in disued bathrooms, demarcs so stuffed with
wire (solder post, wrap, AND 66 blocks) that you can't find your
cable, movin' cools exhausting hot air into a hall way just to get the
POP down to 90... And the most interesting bit was just what sort of
buildings you could manage to find 300 pair to. Why a small hair salon
had a need for a 100 pair cable is beyond me.
Then of course there's the stories of things like coring a hole
through a floor only to come up in the middle of the hallway upstairs
by mistake because someone didn't know how to measure, and the myriad
beanie bundles splicing 25 pair cables that "accidentally" got
cut made even more obvious by the large quantity of electrical tape
holding the thing together...
The things we had to go through for dialup.
Alright, this is all scary familiar and bringing back bad memories.
Wooden modem racks, POPs in disued bathrooms, demarcs so stuffed with
At one point, we had 200 pair installed into a two family house in rural
NJ. The pop was in the basement, which had dirt floors.
Or, the local phone company begging us to get lines in different CO's so
that we wouldn't overload inter-office trunks and tandems.
Or, the custom made racks to hold USR Sportster modems (which had to be
removed from their enclosure)
Or, Livingston PM3's that cost $17k for two PRIs
Or, full BGP between AGIS and iMCI (note the 'i') on a 2501
Or, when you had a mail server (it was monolithic, remember) fail, and
you told customers, they'd say, "OK, I'll check my mail tomorrow"
Ah, the good old days.
Or, the local phone company begging us to get lines in different CO's so
that we wouldn't overload inter-office trunks and tandems.
Or the weekly exchange 'reboots' that happened at ~1am. the MRTG graphs of
your dialins would show everyone logging off quickly followed by 100% of
CPU use as people autodialed back in..
Or, the custom made racks to hold USR Sportster modems (which had to be
removed from their enclosure)
.. and the custom toroidal 10A 12V AC PSUs you'd have to build (and get
tagged by an electrician!) because 300 odd modems in a small space meant
you had 300 odd black wallwarts..
Or, Livingston PM3's that cost $17k for two PRIs
.. hahahaha. And the PM3's that had busted-ass TS015 (I think) PRI code
which meant they wouldn't properly work in Australia. We had to roll
Bay 5399's (with the BLUE LED of doom) or AS5200's.
Migrating to Euro ISDN was a smart move. Thanks Telecom.
Anyone remember when Cisco would sell the "dial solution" as AS5200's with
Cisco VXR's doing L2F offload?
(Our solution: disable PPP multilink on the normal dialin; have a different
number + 2 PRIs for the multilink clients.)
Or, full BGP between AGIS and iMCI (note the 'i') on a 2501
Or, when you had a mail server (it was monolithic, remember) fail, and
you told customers, they'd say, "OK, I'll check my mail tomorrow"
.. how's that different from ISPs today?
Adrian