Monday, July 23, 2012

Simple hardware lessons for a simple software guy

Being a software guy, I don't know much about the hardware that I use. Oh, I understand it at a conceptual level, but I sure wouldn't know anything about how to choose the right line card for a Cisco 6500.

So I'm a software guy, I admit it.

But I still find it helpful to know something about hardware, and so I love to find useful helpful information like Greg Ferro's great article: Top 20 Practical Cabling Tips for Network Engineers – Part One.

It's easy to read, and full of obvious-in-retrospect-but-maybe-you-never-thought-about-it advice like:

Hanging cables within the rack means that means that gravity will induce physical stress on the copper core which will stretch and distort over time. A longer patch lead is heavier and will cause more shear stress on the cable. This will create signal degradation over time and leads to intermittent failures over time.

Greg Ferro is a great author to follow, if you aren't doing so already; keep those tips coming, Greg!

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