Shoutout to the IT guy at a small datacenter in Phoenix who saved me a headache

I was at a client site in Phoenix last week checking their network closet before a big switchover. The datacenter guy there told me he tags every fiber patch cable with a printed label on both ends after he saw a tech pull the wrong one and take down 3 floors of users. I started doing the same thing on my commercial jobs and it's cut my trouble call time in half. Anyone else got a small habit like that from watching someone else's mistake?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_shane19d ago

Wait hold on, that's actually a REALLY good tip but you gotta be careful with those labels. I've seen guys use labels that look nice but the adhesive gets brittle after a year in a warm DC and they just fall off. Then you're left with sticky residue and a guessing game on what cable goes where. My trick is I use colored heat shrink tubing on the connectors themselves - different colors for different zones - and then a label on the cable jacket about 6 inches back. That way even if the label goes bad the color tells me the general area it's serving. The label part though, you need to use a label maker that does industrial grade adhesive or it's just a waste of time.

joel_mason2219d ago

Bro you nailed it lmao. The heat shrink trick is genius, I started doing something similar after my first year in a datacenter where I had a whole rack of unlabeled cables because the labels just peeled off. I use different colored tubing for fiber vs copper too, makes it so much easier when you're tracing stuff at 2am during an outage. The industrial grade adhesive is no joke though, I learned that the hard way when I bought a cheap label maker and the labels were falling off within a month. Now I only use the Brady or Panduit stuff, it costs more but I'd rather spend the money once than redo an entire cabling run every quarter. Colored tubing plus a good label six inches back is the way to go for sure, you can spot the problem area from across the room and then the label tells you exactly what it is.