On Jul 7, 2011, at 4:18 PM, Brent Chapman wrote: > Yes, label the cables (both power and data), but NOT with the name/port of > what they're attached to; that will change over time, and nobody will bother > to update the labels, and then you'll be left with a mislabeled mess.
I've never liked the "serial #" model of cable-labeling because to figure out which port a cable gets plugged into, you need to have constant field-access to some sort of database. What we've moved to is a basic presumption that "one end" of the cable is probably going to remain fixed in perpetuity, but the other end (the server-side end) will have various things plugged into it over time. So the labels indicate, for the "A" end, the infrastructure equipment it's plugged into, but the "Z" end has a location and port number. So for instance, it might be: L1.C4 U34-35 eth0 SW-SD01A 0/5 Which is saying that this plugs into the SD01 cabinet, A-side switch, on port 0/5, but the "server" end plugs into "whatever's racked at U34-35" in cabinet L1.C4. (there's a discrepancy in cabinet nomenclature there mostly because we typically have the colo staff doing the cabling for us in one of our locations, and so the switches follow our internal "logical location" naming scheme, but the server-side we use the nomenclature that the colo staff is going to most easily recognize) If that server is retired, we simply zip-tie all of the cables (power, ethernet, KVM-over-CAT5, etc.) into a single bundle and leave them sort of hanging at that position in the cabinet. When a new server comes along to sit in that location, we cut the zip-tie, and connect all those cables - whose labels still match reality - to the new hardware. Cheers, D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
