Posted in
Main on January 9th, 2008 by Pingdom
We found this picture and couldn’t believe our eyes. This can’t even be called a cable mess. This is cable CHAOS.

“Hmmm… Where does this one lead…?”
Hopefully this isn’t your data center.
Not tired of cable messes yet? Want more? Then check out this excellent, but kind of scary collection.

Posted in
Main on July 3rd, 2009 by Pingdom
Google’s App Engine suffered from increased data access latency and errors yesterday, including problems serving applications. According to TechCrunch, the problems lasted for approximately six hours.
From the App Engine status page:
On July 2nd, all applications experienced increased error rate and latency with read and write Datastore and memcache operations, as well as some serving errors. Datastore access and serving have been fully restored as of 12:25 PM PDT.
What happened yesterday exposed a couple of interesting weaknesses for App Engine.
Read more
Posted in
Pingdom on July 1st, 2009 by Pingdom
We have exciting news to share. As you may have noticed, we made some changes to the Pingdom website yesterday, and the main thing we added was a new account type that many of you are going to love: Pingdom Free.
Now, for the first time ever, you can use Pingdom for free. We’re not talking about a free trial, but a completely free account that you can use for as long as you like, no strings attached.
In other words, you are getting a professional uptime monitoring service for free. With the Pingdom service, you’ll be the first to know when your site goes down.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 30th, 2009 by Pingdom

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that we love everything geeky, and we have often put together themed galleries that appeal to tech geeks like ourselves.
Here is a collection of some of the geekiest galleries that have come and gone on this blog.
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 26th, 2009 by Pingdom
Wordpress.com, the popular blogging service from Automattic, has some interesting growth statistics posted on its website. Among other things, there is a graph showing how many new blogs are created on the service each day.
Based on the graphs that Automattic provides us with, it’s actually not that difficult to estimate how much Wordpress.com will grow in 2009. Which, of course, was a temptation we couldn’t resist!
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Posted in
Main on June 24th, 2009 by Pingdom
Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.
Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.
It took some work, but the results are interesting.
Read more
hardman
January 10th, 2008 at 11:28 am
At least it’s uniform..
Bruce
January 11th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
“Mess”, no, beyond “mess”. “Chaos”? No. It’s hardly stronger
than a mess. “Nightmare”? Yes, that begins to capture it.
Perhaps with a few more adjectives: Unbelievably outrageous nightmare
That’s more like it.
blah
January 24th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
OMG it’s spreading! We’re doomed!
monty
January 24th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
That is completely made of Awesome. You could hide the body of a consultant in that mess.
troels
January 24th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
It’s rather a cable-mesh
phil
January 24th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
the yellow cable is mine
MadDog
January 24th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Obviously the yellow cables are inbound links, the lemon cables are DMZ and the gold cables are from the serial annex. Sheesh, its as if you guys have never had a gay network administrator before!
Mythprogrammer
January 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Are we sure theres a data center under that? maybe its like a giant rubber ball except with cat-5’s
neomodo
January 24th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I swear this was servepath a few years ago
badcop666
January 24th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
hey! I want my shagpile rug back! curse you!
Hmmmm
January 24th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Looks like inside of Apple’s OS
matelot
January 24th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
wholey shit
Dspkable
January 25th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Is that a technicians foot coming out of that mess. GASP! Oh no, poor Bob.
Holy...
January 25th, 2008 at 9:25 am
One word: Unforgivable.
Oh, and three more: I hereby resign.
drakenfly
January 25th, 2008 at 10:25 am
I don’t see any cows, so why do we have straw bails in the middle of the data center? And would some one put the spooled up milking stool away before some one trips and breaks their neck!
John jonson
January 25th, 2008 at 10:35 am
Rofl i bet theres a colony of rodents living in side there
ckaught78
January 25th, 2008 at 10:53 am
The Matrix has you…
dharvell
January 25th, 2008 at 1:40 pm
“We have enough pasta… just need a little sauce!”
br0oce
January 25th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
huh… ever heard of wireless fools!!!
this guy
January 25th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
reminds me of my days as a student network at michigan state university…
alison
January 25th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
This has to be photoshoped… just can’t be real.
Betz
January 25th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
OMG! THE BLOB HAS GONE DIGITAL!!! Run teenagers, run!
joe snuffy
January 25th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
nah, gay net admin would be sunbeam for inbound, mauve for DMZ and cornflower for serial
bofh
January 26th, 2008 at 11:25 pm
all I can say is
“welcome to the jungle, gets worse here every day…”
I really hope they have l3 switches that have decent management capability to show you what’s on what port….
I also wonder how close they are to the 100m limit just getting across the server room
blas
January 27th, 2008 at 5:03 am
ITS PROBLY TELSTRA LOL
HappyPanda
January 28th, 2008 at 4:05 am
@brooce: wireless is nice for an end user but not a data centre. Trust me.
And yes, I have heard of wireless fools. Seems like you are one of them.
Bill Brasky
January 28th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Looks like someone is using too much iSCSI
Wendel Goldthorpe
January 28th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Hint: start using cables which are sized right for the job. 1/2 foot cables turned our racks into heaven.
Trevor
January 28th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
They need the Blade!
Richie Rich
January 30th, 2008 at 4:49 am
This is pure Biltong….100% for sure. This is the machine that makes sliced cheese for burgers!
greenmankc
January 31st, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Looks alot like job security to me.
lestranger
February 1st, 2008 at 4:04 am
I agree, job security. Only the guy who wired it knows how it all works. Way to go, old school. Though it looks almost like that under my desk at home. Ah, old school.
Mr. Snail
February 1st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Someone should hide a yellow egg in there for Easter.
Fishhhook Snook
February 1st, 2008 at 7:14 pm
God help the person who has to do a cable trace for a troubleshooting job.
Hillarious Joe
February 2nd, 2008 at 10:13 pm
SPAGHETTI!!
Little Pig
February 3rd, 2008 at 10:10 pm
And the first of the little pigs house was made of straw…
It
February 5th, 2008 at 12:57 am
And here we have a close up of Cousin It’s mole…
Met Tathione
February 5th, 2008 at 7:10 am
this is a gret post
Ami
February 7th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
“That is completely made of Awesome. You could hide the body of a consultant in that mess.”
I like the way you think.
Ellynn
February 8th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Does the fact that I would love to organize that mess make me obsessive compulsive?
boaby
February 9th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
This is impossible, it can’t work.Don’t you see it? That yellow cable at the far end there is in the wrong place. Sheesh
James D. Newman
February 11th, 2008 at 11:38 pm
I hate to be the one to say this, but it isn’t as bad as it looks. It looks on close inspection that the cables were set in layers, and that sets of cables are tied together. It probably doesn’t happen very often that a single cable needs to be replaced — you likely swap out a whole crate when something goes wrong, and then troubleshoot the part of the crate offline, while the rest of the cluster is still online — wheel it back in mostly wired, and then add the longer cables in. But it sure does look crazy!
blackbeard
February 29th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
Looks like a very square bale of hay.
Zoey
March 3rd, 2008 at 2:56 am
Honestly, who designed this mess? There has GOT to be a better way. Although it does look pretty cool. Hope whoever hooked it up made no mistakes - debugging that would be a nightmare.
Pete
March 15th, 2008 at 11:16 pm
I’ll bet it looked great when the guys who did the structured cabling walked out the door. Not so good two days after though…
James Clements
April 22nd, 2008 at 2:55 am
Looks like my bedroom!
ghpk
June 2nd, 2008 at 3:12 pm
looks like noodles, Just add some spice and EAT them All.
Dan Z
August 24th, 2008 at 8:48 am
James Newman - are you on crack?
Eric Howse
September 19th, 2008 at 4:07 am
I worked there last summer as a temp Rack and Stack Engineer. It’s a very large datacenter in St. Louis, Missouri. I believe the guys there called it “the wall if despair” I actually did some cable tracing.
That’s crazy I wanted to take a pic of it so bad, but if they even seen you with a cell phone in the Datacenter it was immediate termination.
eny0
October 17th, 2008 at 5:58 am
may i have some bolognese with that?
Bob Johnson
November 21st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
This picture is of Lehman Brothers World Financial Center 3 data center. Pre 9/11 it was the primary Data center, post 9/11 this site was breached by the dust and written off completely. Which was a good thing since there was no other way to fix that mess. Days were lost just trying to trace a single connection. There is a smaller gray version of this wall one of the NJ data centers thats still in use.
Uncluttered
February 14th, 2009 at 9:06 am
If there’s a dead person under there you wouldn’t even find him!
the cableGuy
May 19th, 2009 at 1:41 am
name? you wanna name? Jimmy Hoffa! Howz that for name?..I’ll even tell you that he’s in there..you still gotta find ‘im.
Shannon
May 23rd, 2009 at 11:59 am
Good lord.. if there are servers or network gear behind that mess, I wonder how hot they’re running? There’s 0 air flow!!!
Pete Mc
June 1st, 2009 at 4:28 pm
Go to darkroastedblend.com, click on [funny pics] then [crazy wiring]. You’ll be there for ever…