My Home Fibre Network Disintegrated

Summary

This morning I woke up and headed to my bomb shelter to grab the bike pump to inflate the tyres on my children’s bikes. The handle got slightly tangled up in the fibre optic cables so I lifted up the cables to free the pump.Like cookie crumbs the fibre cable’s sleeve jackets crumbled in my hands.Before I could even utter “Oh fuck no”, another section of the cable exploded outwards with thin metal wires jutting out from what seems to be like strands of white plastic threads, which I assume is the Kevlar sheath. I think I must have stood in my pseudo server room in shock for a whole minute, unable to move or process what had happened. A main component of why I was in sheer horror was the fact that I had stupidly buried all of these cables under my cement flooring in PVC trunking from my shelter to all of the rooms in the flat. If this cable fails, the connection from the server room to a specific room would be permanently severed. The room for this particular cable turned out to be my home office where my homelab MS-A2 resided.I had purchased these cables from FS.com roughly 3.5 years ago in 2022. Because I was burying the cables underground permanently, I opted to get the MiLiTaRy GrAdE armoured fibre cables for this purpose.The cables had been kept spooled up with a radius of around 5cm for 3 whole years, lightly tied together with hook and loop cable fasteners and hung on laundry hooks in the shelter all this time.The destroyed cable is the only one that I had unravelled recently to patch into my UDM to enable SFP+ connection to my office space. As it turns out, armoured cables in this specific instance aren’t really meant for movement, it’s likely more of a bury and forget purpose. In hindsight I should’ve connected all of the cables to a fibre patch panel on the wall so that they would never move, then connect the patch panel to my UDM with easily replaceable LSZH cables.But it’s too late now, all I can do is to salvage the situation. I headed out and purchased 3...