Skip to the standing index
SCARLETGENT LTD
Illustration of a small wall-mounted comms cabinet with neatly routed blue and orange patch cables, door open. Illustration, not this company's equipment or a client installation.
Illustration made for this page. Not this company’s equipment, and not a client installation.

Information technology consultancy · SIC 62020 and 62090 · Shoreditch, London

Nine numbered entries, written in the order a small network gives them up

SCARLETGENT LTD looks at what a company already runs — the cabinet and the switches, the links between them, the accounts that reach them, the records meant to describe them — and leaves the description behind. The work is short and it ends in a document. What follows is that document’s index, and every entry in it is written out below.

The count comes before the opinion

An audit that opens with a judgement spends the rest of its life defending it. One that opens with a count only has to be accurate. The first pass is arithmetic: how many switches, how many ports on each, how many of those ports have something live in them, how many wall sockets end somewhere that can be found again. Nothing is graded on that pass. The sheet is dated, and every opinion written afterwards has to agree with it or say why not.

  • The countwhat is there, in figures
  • The drawingwhere it sits, in an elevation
  • The writingwhat it does, in sentences
  • The handoverwho holds it, in a folder

Five kinds of thing are counted

An inventory stays useful only while the word item means one thing. Five categories carry what a small office actually has; anything that fits none of them goes into the notes rather than into the count.

Devices

Anything with a power lead and an address: switches, access points, printers, the machine under a desk.

Links

Every run between two of those, patch or permanent, written down by both of its ends.

Accounts

Every login that reaches any of it, including the ones nobody has signed into for a year.

Renewals

Anything carrying a date: a licence, a domain, a certificate, a support arrangement.

Records

The documents that already exist, counted as items because they age like everything else.

The cabinet is drawn as it stands

A cabinet is easier to argue about from a drawing than from memory. The elevation is taken as found: every unit named for what it does rather than for what is printed on the front, the patch runs traced between them afterwards, and the empty units left as outlines so the spare height reads as plainly as the used height.

A twelve-unit cabinet elevation drawn from the bottom up Twelve rack units inside a cabinet frame. Seven are filled and labelled by function — cable management, power, a shelf, a router, two eight-port switches and a patch panel. Five are empty outlines. Two patch runs are traced from the panel down to each switch. cable management1U spare2U switched power strip3U spare4U spare5U shelf, with the line box on it6U spare7U router8U spare9U eight-port switch10U eight-port switch11U patch panel, 24 ports12U
Twelve units: seven in use, five spare. The runs are drawn after the units because that is the order they are surveyed in.

Illustration of a London brick warehouse frontage with tall metal windows and a plain door, no signage. Illustration, not this company's premises.
Illustration made for this page. Not this company’s premises, and not a building it holds any interest in.

The address is part of the record

Equipment lives in a building, and the building is half of the entry. A cabinet recorded without the street, the floor, the room and the wall has not really been recorded, because the next person to read the line cannot go and stand in front of it. SCARLETGENT LTD is registered at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, and takes engagements short enough to finish inside the building they concern.

How a short engagement is shaped, and how it ends

A convention written down outlives whoever chose it

Half of what goes wrong in a small network is a convention nobody wrote down: the port numbering, the naming, the colour that means uplink.

A label that only makes sense to the person who wrote it is not a label. It is a note to self with a cable attached.

So the convention goes into the document ahead of the inventory, in one short section with worked examples, and the inventory is then written to obey it. A convention on paper survives the person who chose it. One held in somebody’s head leaves the building when they do.

Spare ports are the capacity, and capacity has an edge

Switch capacity is not a feeling. It is the ports on the wall, less the ports with something live in them, and the moment that figure reaches nothing the next device needs a switch rather than a cable. The sheet does the arithmetic on figures you type and shows each step, because the step is the part worth arguing with.

Port-count sheet

Each step, in the order it is worked
Ports on the wall3 switches × 8 ports = 24
Spare capacity24 − 17 in use = 7 spare
Share in use17 ÷ 24 = 70.8 per cent
Room before the next switch7 more devices fit; the next one after that needs another switch

Guide only — arithmetic on the numbers you typed, and nothing else.

Two entries that are only ever written in pairs

A link is recorded when both of its ends are

A patch run drawn between a numbered switch port and a numbered wall socket, both ends ticked switch port 06 wall socket B12
Switch port 06 to socket B12 — one line, written from both ends.

A link with one end recorded is a cable disappearing into a wall. Both ends go down together, or the run stays in the notes as unterminated until somebody has stood at each of them.

Every account is written against a person or a purpose

Four ruled account rows, three carrying an owner mark and the fourth left open no owner yet
Three accounts answer to somebody. The fourth is listed by name until it does.

An account with no owner is the oldest entry there is. Each one is written against a person who uses it or a purpose that needs it, and the ones answering to neither are listed plainly so a decision can be taken in daylight.

The engagement ends with a handover

A visit ends when the car pulls away. An engagement ends when the company holds the document, can read it without the person who wrote it, and can say which parts of it have gone stale.

  1. The inventory is read back against the room it describes.
  2. Each record is dated on the day it was last true.
  3. Anything changed since its record is listed as stale.
  4. The folder is handed over with the gaps named in it.

What a company holds once the engagement closes

Documentation coverage

Written up
15 ÷ 24 = 62.5 per cent
Still current
15 − 4 stale = 11 records, or 45.8 per cent
Needed for 90 per cent
90 per cent of 24 = 21.6, rounded up to 22 current records
Left to write
22 − 11 = 11 records, 4 of them rewrites

Guide only — arithmetic on the numbers you typed, and nothing else.