On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 10:46:14AM -0500, Matt Simmons wrote: > Anyway, so given this really suboptimal arrangement, I want to be able to > more easily identify a particular patch cable because, as you can imagine, > tracing a wire is no fun right now. > > While everyone that I've talked to agrees that both ends need labeled. The > question is what do you put on them. The schools of thought as far as I am > aware are: > > 1) Every cable end's label says exactly what the other end is connected to, > including hostname and port number > > 2) Every cable end's label is uniquely identified to that cable, because > things move and relabeling sucks. > > 3) <insert your other viewpoint here> > > Is there actually some best practice that I'm unaware of? How would you do > it in this case?
Here's the philosophical question: are you optimizing for the every day case or the emergency case? Every day, you won't be tracing cables. In the rare event that it happens, you can spend as long as needed. In an emergency, you need to know right now where the other end of this cable is going. In this case, I recommend optimizing for the emergency. The near label identifies the far end of the cable. Sure, re-labelling sucks -- but looking things up in an indirection table during an emergency is worse. I also notice that all your cables are purple or purple-blue. There's probably a color-coding scheme of some sort, probably one that assigns meaning to the colors. My advice is to rethink it next time you recable. You can usually find six to twelve colors of cable without any trouble. When you've got a rack full of machines going to a switch, start at the switch and alternate colors down the ports. If you have a colorblind compatriot -- and I do -- check that the colors are sufficiently distinct. It is much easier to trace one of the four green cables in a bundle of 48 than it is to trace one of the 24 purples, and when you arrive at the far end it will be obvious to you that the blue cable plugged into that port is not the green cable you were expecting. Does it look as pretty as a mass of half yellow cables and half blue? Probably not, although there is something to be said for a properly curried rainbow. -dsr- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
