Labelling cables

There was a discussion lately at my workplace about how to label cables. Currently our cables at the datacenter sadly haven’t been labelled by the previous staff which makes tracing them a nightmare as cables tend to span multiple racks.

So I went ahead and proposed some types of labels I came across in my career so far; about one I’d like to write about here: label each cable at both ends with a word that’s unique across all our sites. Why a word and not a number like e.g. ANSI/TIA 606-C promotes? We deal a lot with 3rd party and non IT remote hands and I found words to be more robust than numbers against spelling errors.

Imagine e.g. that you need to find cable 123080. There’s the risk that an introduced spelling error might lead to the wrong cable being decommissioned. Just imagine a snafu and you misspelled the number in any of the following places:

• while writing the ticket for the remote hands
• while printing the actual label
• while documenting the cable’s current connection
• you grabbed the wrong cable with a similar number back then after a long and exhausting day at work not spotting the error

There is literally no chance for anybody to recognize if 123080 really is the cable number we are searching or if it really should be e.g. 132080. Using words really helps in that regard as it addresses the following points:

• typos can be easily recognized and fixed by humans, sometimes even silently
• grabbing the wrong label can be easily recognized (wait, this is bert but I was suppossed to install hugo!)

Cables will be connected to the chosen word for the rest of it’s lifetime, no matter where the cable will be repurposed. This reduces the amount of labels you actually need to print and moving a cable does not require to issue new labels which comes especially handy on our remote sites where we can’t expect a 3rd party to have a label printer ready to issue new labels which are unique to our company. This leaves us with one …