Walked into a server room yesterday that was a total disaster zone

I got a call from a small law firm downtown to check on their network slowdowns. When I opened the server closet, it looked like a spaghetti monster exploded. Cables everywhere, dust caked on the fans, and two switches just sitting on top of each other with no airflow. The temps inside that closet had to be pushing 95 degrees easy. I spent about 4 hours cleaning it up, rerouting cables, and adding a small fan. After I was done, their file transfers went from crawling at 20 Mbps to over 900 Mbps. The partner said they'd been dealing with lag for like 6 months and just thought it was normal. Has anyone else seen a simple cleanup fix that much of a performance gap?

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coleman.henry1d ago

My buddy Mark runs IT for a dental office over in Arlington. He was bitching one day about how their x-ray uploads were taking forever so I tagged along to check it out. Their server closet was basically a storage room with a broken AC unit and a patch panel that hadn't been touched since 2012. He spent like three hours just vacuuming dust out of the server chassis and replacing a couple of dead fans and suddenly their backup times dropped from 8 hours to just under 45 minutes.