The biggest risk to your
tech infrastructure:
other people!
2024-03-12
I live in a high-rise condominium, which is a pretty complicated little domiciliary ecosystem. Let's set aside all the considerations that keep the building from falling down spontaneously, those which bring clean water into the building and sewage out, and those which supply the nearly indispensable utility known as electricity, and focus instead on what can be called "technological infrastructure": electrical lines that carry signals — yes, even analog ones, though digital signalling is far more pervasive these days — to the various parts of the building in order to provide access control and monitoring. We'll ignore in-home stuff like Internet and the archaic-but-still-not-quite-dead POTS, and focus on things relating to a shared building's common elements.
Because we have a lot of floors, we have a few elevators, and because we like to keep up with the times, there is a fob-based access control system building-wide, including in the elevators, used to control access to the "club" level, where we have a bunch of nice amenities. The system even extends to the parking garage, but that makes it a bit complicated, because, due to the era in which our building was constructed, there's no hardline between the two structures. Thus it was that an RF-based bridge was installed some years ago, to extend the LAN so residents could access the parkade with fobs as well.
Unfortunately, it turns out the installer took ( unsurprisingly ) as little time and effort as possible to set up the system in the garage, which explained why the system had been flaky in terms of stability. When I inspected it earlier today, I noticed that an electrical box had been simply stuffed full of surplus cabling, in a way that could be best described as rabid spaghetti, as devoid of labels as it was rife with chaos. Worst of all, the ethernet cabling had been kinked in a severe way at various points, to the degree I'm surprised the system had ever worked. I untangled the mess, sang a song of comfort to the abused cables, and then neatly bundled them up and back into the box, in a much more sane manner. I then used my laptop to check the connection, which had started working properly. Satisfied with the improvement, I reconnected the garage zone controller to the network, and then I securely remoted into the office ( via phone hotspot, and while phoning our office manager ) to inspect the management software, which indicated ( once again, unsurprisingly ) that the garage zone was now online.
It's possible there are bigger problems that will need to be addressed in future, but at the very least, treating cabling like it has actual physical limits ( rather than a clothesline or a ball of trash ) is a good start to ensuring that a network-dependent system remains functional. It doesn't take a significant amount of extra time to do things well, so I'm always baffled when they're — all too often — rushed, with the consequent problems. Maybe I'm just a fool who doesn't understand the concept of "job security". 🙄
With the garage zone sorted, it was time to focus on "elevator zone", which was also showing "offline" in the management software. We recently completed our extensive elevator renovation program, having added the fobs as a new feature, with the zone controllers having been installed in the elevator control room at the top of the building. Arriving there, it was ( yet again ) absolutely no surprise to note another utility box jammed full with a rat's nest of devices and cabling. I pulled out the uplink cable, and connected with my laptop. The DHCP protocol dutifully walked through its steps, but got stuck after assigning itself a link-local address, indicating that the uplink was faulty, or at least wasn't serving DHCP. It's an older CAT 5E cable that runs all the way to the basement, so it wasn't surprising that it might have a fault. I ran out of time at that point, however, so I'll have to do further diagnostics another time. Frankly, I kinda hope the cable is trashed, because it gives us a reason to replace it with something a bit more recent, in case we need more bandwidth in future — there's a rentable party room at the top of the building, and we hold board meetings there, so it'd be nice to have a solid WiFi link available.
What's the moral of this story? Well, you can pay good money, and still not get good service. Most companies nowadays don't give a rip about you or your needs, and their employees often won't either, unless you get to know them a little. Even then, it helps to get a second opinion from someone who really knows their stuff, and / or have the work supervised or checked, to make sure it wasn't half-assed. It shouldn't be this way, but it do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯