Appreciation post: that server room fire alarm drill back in 2015

Was working a contract at a county building in Springfield when the fire alarm went off mid-drill and I tripped over a loose cable, which made me realize zip ties are not optional for cable management, has anyone else had a hardware fail because of something as dumb as messy wiring?

2 comments

2 Comments

joseph_torres1mo ago

Oh man, that brings back memories of the worst server room incident I ever saw. We had this IT guy at my old job who thought cable management was just shoving everything behind the rack and hoping for the best. One day he's pulling a dead drive and his sleeve catches on a loose SATA cable, yanks the whole bundle, and down goes the main file server for the whole office. Boss walked in and saw the rat's nest and just lost it. Made us spend a whole weekend labeling and zipping everything proper. The worst part is that stupid cable was probably the reason the drive died in the first place from vibration or something. I swear, half the hardware failures I've seen could've been avoided with ten bucks worth of zip ties and a little patience.

the_patricia1mo ago

I actually read a study a few years back that said loose cables in server racks can cause enough micro-vibration to mess with drive read/write heads over time. Something about the airflow from cooling fans making them flutter. Your story about the dead drive being caused by that cable, yeah I could totally see it. We had a similar mess at a place I worked, but the guy who set it up used twist ties from bread bags instead of zip ties. It took us a whole afternoon just to figure out which cable went where because all the labels had fallen off. What finally fixed it was one of those cheap label makers from an office supply store and a hundred pack of zip ties. Saved us from a nightmare later when a switch died and we could actually swap it out in ten minutes instead of an hour.