Matt Simmons of the Standalone Sysadmin blog asked about labeling network cables in a datacenter on the LOPSA-Tech mailing list which brought up a number of issues.
He wrote:
So, my current situation is that I'm working in a datacenter with 21 racks arranged in three rows, 7 racks long. We have one centralized distribution switch and no patch panels, so everything is run to the switch which lives in the middle, roughly. It's ugly and non-ideal and I hate it a bunch, but it is what it is. And it looks a lot like this.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.
He wanted advice as to whether the network cables should be labeled with exactly what the other end is connected to, including hostname and port number, or use a unique ID on each cable so that as they move around they don't have to be relabeled.
We write about this in the Data Centers chapter of The Practice of System and Network Administration but I thought I'd write a bit more for this blog.
My reply is after the bump...
