PDU wiring – is this normal (or even safe)?

That’s shockingly bad (sorry!). If that cable gets yanked out by someone, at the very best it will short out and hopefully trip the circuit breaker, possibly taking out power in other racks or even other parts of the building. Worst case, somebody could be killed.

Personally I’d do the following:

  1. Carefully secure the rack. Lock it up, post a notice to admins to not touch it under any circumstances. Make sure people are aware there is a dangerous electrical fault within the rack. If you have a server failure, so be it, that is too dangerous for anyone but a trained electrician to go near it. The stakes are too high.
  2. Call a professional registered electrician to fix that.
  3. Plan for downtime whilst the electrician does what’s needed.
  4. Find out who was responsible for that, and if they are still employed, report them to management, as they should be severely disciplined for putting other people at risk.

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