Week 3 Reflection

This week, I learned how the management of an IDF can make finding ports on switches so much easier or worse, depending on how well and often it is managed. This IDF was not as bad as the pictures my mentor has shown me of the previous management of these IDFs and MDFs, but it still needed some tidying up, and after we were done tidying it up, it made a huge difference in how much easier it was to access these ports. And another thing I learned is that some projects can have a dual purpose, what I mean is that digital and analog phones are on the way out in this systems environment to bring in VoIP. So that gets rid of some of the work for removing those and cleaning them up for installing new VoIP phones in Lewis Hall.

One of the challenges in this project, I can see for both the future and now, is that it is a lot of work to reorganize these cat cables when they get out of hand. How do I, as an intern network tech, think about managing these in the future, and now for when the installations of the VoIP system happen? To me, the best practice would be to check it periodically, have a sign-in and out system, and to know what was done during your time in there for both security and organizational purposes.

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