wish I had photos of the data center at a college campus I used to work for. they would be so paranoid about us student workers having access to it (even though when no one big was around our boss gave us his keycard to the door) yet let any tom,dick,harry and jane into the room.

Barely completed sections of the walls in some parts of it, etc greeted you. It wasn't *too* bad until you started taking a closer look at everything. All the fiber runs just got randomly dragged all over the campus and dumped up there randomly, maybe stuffed into the over head racks. so many came through pipes in the floor that I swore jimmy hoffa would pass one up and wink at you as it came through...

remember all the outside contractors? they would come in, install the crap and leave. usually lots of work with the punchdown jacks/blocks. I found so many small shards/pieces of copper wire/insulated parts of it jammed in the power strips just tossed on the floor. it perplexed me they touted it as the "million dollar network center" yet treated it like a dump and had fire/short circuit hazards just dumped into the power strips all over the floor

at least it was cold as hell in there during the summer, very nice being here in las vegas.

for about 2-3 days or so, A entire college network (CCSN, now CSN, hell yeah I will say names) was offline due to a ancient network design with no backup plans. when a Cisco Switch died, everything died. network, computer labs, even their website. presidents email, it was all gone and offline. Same place as the above story, but a different campus.

(the main campus, so called that because it was built first in the 70's, cheyenne campus) would frequently lose all it's main grid power and power generators if the wind got up to a certain speed, couldn't make that up if I tried...

anyway, off it sat for 3 days, my boss at the campus I worked at was up for about 3 days straight practically fixing the errors and issues with it, resetting all devices, etc. Got to see the devices guts that died also, funny to imagine a Mighty OC-192? fiber ring going offline due to a failed network design not taking into account backup devices. I forgot the speed, but it was explained to me if one part of it died, the traffic for california and arizona networks could be switched to each other with no loss.

is there a way you could shut down the server room above and fix it up, or it is too critical to do that? :p