Troubleshooting fiber with… your phone?
I came across a cool trick recently while troubleshooting an LC fiber connection. Essentially I had a 100 foot fiber run which had been cabled by a third party, and two Dell 2824 switches I needed to link via transceivers. With everything in place I was not getting any connection lights. I tried reseating the transceivers, swapping fiber cables, etc. without any luck, and had begun to think I might be unable to proceed with my task of linking two server closets. When I called Dell to troubleshoot the transceivers, the technician asked me if I had a camera in my phone (luckily it’s 2009 and I’m outfitted with the latest in cellular technology). He directed me to turn on the camera and point it at either end of my fiber termination; by doing so I was able to pick up the light coming from both my LC transceiver and fiber cable! Further, it showed me the solution to my problem was simply taking apart my LC cable ends to swap cable placement. Crisis averted.
To illustrate, I have uploaded some pictures of what the naked eye was unable to detect. The bluish aura is what you should expect to see in a working configuration.
2 Responses to “Troubleshooting fiber with… your phone?”
Comment from Angelique
Time December 11, 2009 at 11:04 am
Thank you so much for this great tip, saved us time, money and headaches!
Comment from Ted Swanson
Time September 9, 2009 at 7:06 am
Nice work, Justin. Even better, you were able to use your phone to take pictures of what you did.
We had the same problem at the data center late one night. We plugged an SC cable in and got nothing – then we flipped the cables (they were snapped together with a plastic housing) and everything worked again.