Today's photo caption: Fall is the season...and the reason for this failure.  

Welcome back to Tech Service Today's IT Disaster of the Week series where we showcase the ugliest IT environment our technicians ran into this week. 

In many previous IT Disaster posts, we've discussed the benefits of using low-profile wall-mount racks and wall brackets for small networks. When you have a small restaurant, store, or office network that consists of just a few items (let's say a 12-port patch panel, a 12-port switch, and a router), a small rack is all you need. When you only require 3U of rack space, we often recommend a vertical mounting rack/bracket because the equipment mounts facing up. That means the depth runs from top-to-bottom, so your equipment doesn't stick out from the wall nearly as far as it would in a traditional, horizontal wall-mount rack where equipment gets mounted front-to-back.

While vertical-mounting wall racks/brackets have obvious space-saving advantages, this week's featured photo shows us one of the potential downsides to these solutions. Specifically, if the plaster on the surface of your wall is disintegrating because of an unresolved moisture problem inside the wall, then all the unused ports on the face of your equipment become receptacles for that plaster dust & debris. This is one situation where having your cup runneth over is not a good thing.

Allowing equipment ports to fill with dirt and debris is never good - especially when the debris is damp with moisture. (Water and Electricity do not play well together.) So what should an IT professional do when the fall season arrives in their building, making the wall colors change, while leaflets of plaster fall all over their equipment?

Well the first thing to do is fix the water problem in the wall. Next, consider using patch cables with snagless boots when connecting to equipment that is mounted vertically because those boots actually work like little umbrellas, preventing any falling airborne dust, dirt, even wet plaster from landing in the ports. This week's disaster photo illustrates how much better protected the port containing the blue patch cable with the snagless boot is compared to those holding cables with basic connectors (no boots).

This disparity of cable types also represents our final teaching point for this week. There are three different styles of patch cables connected to this piece of equipment, an indication that our customer either doesn't have company-wide technology standards or they don't adhere to them.

As IT professionals, we can't just use whatever cables or equipment we have lying around. It is our responsibility to determine which technologies our companies need in order to remain successful and competitive in the marketplace, and then deploy & support those technologies in every location.

Just as the road of life is paved with flattened squirrels who couldn't decide which way to run, our industry is littered with unemployed IT professionals who couldn’t define a technology roadmap for their company and then take decisive action to follow that course.

So don’t be squirrelly with your IT decisions. Remember: It’s never too late to do the right thing, or to do things the right way.