Today's photo caption: The tradition of wrapping gifts. 

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. 

Wrapping gifts is a tradition that has been around a long time. The reason it's so popular is that most human beings love surprises - both giving and receiving them. And the team members at Tech Service Today (TST) are no different.

Our technicians are always eager to see what surprises await them when arriving at a customer site to troubleshoot network or system problems/failures. In fact, many of those surprises end up being the featured photos used in this IT Disaster of the Week blog series. (If you want to know how often we encounter these "surprises", consider that we started this weekly blog over two years ago, yet our library of disaster images continues to grow larger every day.)

This week's disaster is a bit more subtle than many of our photos. When our technician first climbed on the roof of this facility and opened this outdoor-rated enclosure, everything looked ok...at least on first glance. But as Admiral Hyman G. Rickover once said, “The Devil is in the details.”

Upon a more thorough investigation, we found a cable that was terminated improperly. Actually, not only was the cable jacket cut too far back from the Cat5e jack on which it was terminated, the jack itself is one made for indoor use and is not the best choice for use in a roof-top enclosure exposed to such harsh environmental conditions.

While the outdoor enclosure prevents moisture (rain) from entering the cable sheath, it can not prevent ambient humidity from causing corrosion to the RJ-45 side of the jack, nor entering the cable where the jacket was stripped back too far. And when copper cabling gets wet, its dielectric performance is changed, which affects impedance and the related parameters of attenuation and return loss. That can have a serious effect on the cabling's ability to support high bit-rate data applications like Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. 

According to DMSI's Andy Schmeltzer, a seasoned-veteran of the structured cabling industry, "if there is any possibility of your low-voltage cabling getting exposed to water - whether direct moisture or ambient humidity - I always recommend using waterproof Cat5e jacks or couplers."

If this month brings you disasterous gifts like the kind we unwrap every day, remember this:

If the weather outside becomes frightful. . . your network can still run delightful.
But if it ever starts running wonky. . . call TST, call TST, call TST.