Growing in experience

On many projects that I have started in my position as the first IT guy at a nearly-megachurch church, I have had the opportunity to experience a shift from understanding the projects conceptually to understanding them experientially.

With our network overhaul, currently underway, I am doing just that. I knew it would be a booger to run new Cat-6 to the entire plant, but now I’m seeing that it’s nearly impossible to get it to happen.

Some of the challenges that we face:

  1. 5 distinct different buildings, all melded together into one behemoth of a structure. Each of the 5 were built about a decade after the previous, and built on a budget without much consideration for networking and future wiring needs. Plus, the earliest was built in ‘48 with no drop ceilings and full of asbestos.
  2. No current IDF’s are in place, switches are strewn about in various offices and mechanical closets.
  3. The room that I have secured for an IDF is centrally located, but is upstairs and requires massive conduit to be placed on the roof to get downstairs.
  4. Though the physical distance from the main IDF to the offices in the front of the building is less than 300-feet, the path the cable must take is about 400-feet, which means I need to find room for another IDF - however, 350 of the 400 feet are in the attic above the sanctuary.
  5. I’m an IT guy, not a construction expert, and our maintenance guys have been giving me a hard time about that because I think things would work that just wouldn’t.
  6. I can’t afford to pay a contractor.

So, this will be a fun project, with a capital F-U-N. You may wonder why I feel the need to rerun the entire network, I’ll post about that soon.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 1st, 2007 at 8:05 pm and is filed under IT Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Growing in experience”

  1. jake Says:
    December 1st, 2007 at 10:30 pm

    “F” is for friends who do stuff together,

    “U” is for U and ME,

    “N” is for n-e-were anytime at all, down here in the deep blue sea!

  2. David Szpunar Says:
    December 2nd, 2007 at 8:42 am

    Wow, that is quite a challenge! I feel your pain; my church is made up of four buildings all meshed into one, over a similar time period, with the newest phase recently completed. We’re not redoing all network runs (although some of them need it for various reasons) but I did just complete several new runs recently, some going from one old building to the new one. The new building is a little better than the old ones, but it’s still not great. And they didn’t run enough network jacks for everything we’ve needed so we’ve had to run new runs in it several times, which is very annoying. But hey, when you don’t ask the network guy (me) where to run network, I guess that’s what you get, right?

    We are fortunate to have three IDFs, all connected by Fiber (my doing since I started), including one in the new building, one in the church offices, and one in the oldest building. Everywhere on campus is less than 300′ from these IDFs (barely). But running cable is definitely NOT fun! Challenging? Yes! :-)

    I am curious to hear your reasoning for rewiring the entire network–I’ve considered this but it’s not feasible for us right now. We do need to rerun the lines from the office IDF to each office to properly reach to the new networking equipment that is mostly unused, put in as part of the new building (it’s doing plenty, but it’s uplinked to our old switches for now).

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