I was a fiber installer once upon a time in the 00s. A guy I worked with who was "the splicer" for our team and has years of experience using the little easy bake oven thing swore by going off the smell to know when it's "ready". Probably not the greatest thing for your health considering he did at least 10-12 of these a day.
The old manual tools were extremely slow. Modern fibre splicers mean that a dozen fibres can be spliced in maybe a bit more half an hour, although cable prep cam take a significant amount of time depending on the cable type, number of cables and splice closure. Even more if you're using a ribbon splicer that fuses 12 fibres per burn.
Modern fiber splicers are fully automatic, so you don't need to smell :-) The only thing that's still mostly by hand is the cutting (mostly stripping away the various layers of insulation).
I've always had stuff like this turned down by Netbox, they argue they want to model the logical topology as a source to trust, not the physicality, but then they model rack U placement. I'm always puzzled by their stance.
Like you can't model 1 cat5 split into two 100mb terminations, patch panels are kinda of hack, I think you can now but forever you couldn't just swap a termination direction because logically why would you (but their UI gets messy when 44 are done A-B and the 45th B-A)
Anyway that's thoughts as of maybe v2 or 3? Before the new UI when it was all jquery.
One of the achievements in my career I’m lowkey proudest of is sneaking in the rewire of about 45,000 ports on a campus that were split pair after an explicit project to do so was shot down.
Of course, but a splitter in a PON network or a WDM device are perhaps better examples of things that are hacky to model. Multi-fibre cables and splices are another. Netbox is great for some simple applications, and it's fantastic OSS, but in practice falls short for many use cases.
Fiber splicers are marvels of technology. They align the fiber cores with sub-micrometer accuracy and produce just the right amount of heat and pressure to melt the ends together. They are also usually very rugged, fully automated, and surprisingly cheap (a few thousand euros). It is remarkable what is possible when the entire internet relies on a technology.
I did my PhD on fibre lasers, 0.1 DB would have been considered a ver bad splice and I would have recut and respliced (if you have 1-10W in your cavity that 0.1 dB loss would risk burning and the fuse propagating through your cavity destroying everything in its path (as a side not look up Videos of fibre fuse, looks fascinating). In my experience 0.01-0.02 is much more typical than 0.1 dB loss.
We were splicing some fiberglass in job training a few years back and it was honestly pretty cool! The website is also really nice, I remember seeing the color codes on the splicing machine. Mesmerizing piece of technology.
Like you can't model 1 cat5 split into two 100mb terminations, patch panels are kinda of hack, I think you can now but forever you couldn't just swap a termination direction because logically why would you (but their UI gets messy when 44 are done A-B and the 45th B-A)
Anyway that's thoughts as of maybe v2 or 3? Before the new UI when it was all jquery.
Ugh I don't really blame them there, that's really a dirty hack. Sure I've done in a pinch but not for permanent stuff.
I wouldn't call that professional network management. If you really wanna do it, just split the pairs over two patch ports IMO.
Thank you :)