Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Wednesday, 30 October 2002

# 9:45 PM

They're putting in new network wiring here at ICSI. Current practice for this seems to be to run separate cables from the wiring closet to each and every ethernet jack on the floor. I find this bizarre. It's harder to do, it's not at all extensible, it uses far more wire than it should, and it'll have to be done all over again when they want to bump from 100baseT up to whatever replaces it. I would have thought that the appropriate tactic was to put a fiber optic loop all the way around the building, with fanout hubs to each cluster of offices.