Labelling your cabinets

[garethedmondson]

With the GCSE, and ALevel pupils about to leave for their exams, I'm going to have a bit more time to tidy up our two rack cabinets.

Over the years they have been setup, switches installedm, cables run - nothing labelled (yet I know where everything is LOL).

I'm wondering how you guys label everything. The other year we purchased a labelling system that prints onto stickers - but they wouldn't stick to the network cables (they kept bending).

So I'm wondering what you guys use to label - do you write on the cable? Do you purchase stuff in?

Cheers

Gareth

[kmount]

We used to use a brother label printer which worked quite well for most things. Cables are a challenge, I've in the past used a black finetip marker to write on the end which worked OK having failed with labels!

[Soulfish]

For cables one thing I've done + seen done elsewhere is to have a colour banding system (similar to resistors for anyone familiar with them ).

So you'd have for instance 4 bands, with each band being one of a selection of colours. With 2 colours and 4 bands you get 16 different combinations. Expand it to 4 colours and you get 256 combinations. If you need more you just add extra bands and/or colours

Obviously it means you have to keep a listing of combinations somewhere, unless you happen to have an amazing memory.

[kmount]

Clever!

[synaesthesia]

One to remember actually, I'd personally used printed labels with a touch of tape to stop them going anywhere although it didn't always look particularly good, it was effective.

Will likely use that scheme in future, just print out a legend and stick it to the side of the cabinet

[sted]

for cables i use a normal label printer but attach them like a flag rather than along the cable

[john]

Bradey Label Printers are good for this job they make some for cables that print the name / info around it on a white bit and then you wrap it round the cable and its got a long bit attached to it of over-laminate and that covers the label so it makes a very secure label on the cable.

As for other ways, different coloured cables are good ways of doing it so have servers one colour, phones another, uplinks, cross overs etc etc (you get the drift).

[eduabncs]

There are specialist labels for this...!

A quick google and....

Sharpmark UK - Product Information

Cable Labels

[linkazoid]

There are specialist labels for this...!

Cable Labels

Can vouch for these, we use them and they work perfectly. Just print from your normal laserjet.

The exe can be a bit of a pain tho, but it works....

Michael

[witch]

For cables one thing I've done + seen done elsewhere is to have a colour banding system (similar to resistors for anyone familiar with them ).

So you'd have for instance 4 bands, with each band being one of a selection of colours. With 2 colours and 4 bands you get 16 different combinations. Expand it to 4 colours and you get 256 combinations. If you need more you just add extra bands and/or colours

Obviously it means you have to keep a listing of combinations somewhere, unless you happen to have an amazing memory.

Resistor colour code: er...black brown red orange yellow green blue violet grey white!! (0-9 simplistically)
And all without looking it up!

To think that that stuff I learned as an electronics engineer all those years ago could come in useful now...I'm gonna use it to label my cabinets

[synaesthesia]

I'm glad you can remember all of that, I certainly can't Spent many an hour trying to remember but never managed it. When it come to actually using it we had Google to hand

[garethedmondson]

Some great ideas here guys. Many thanks,

Our colour coding is simple - grey cables for CAT5/5e and green for CAT 6. Simple.

This is why I want labelling LOL. It's already there so I cannot really afford to replace different cable swith different colours.

I like the cable label system. Will look at that in more detail when I get back into school.

Cheers everyone

GJE

[Edu-IT]

Some of our cables are labeled up with little tags that attach to the cables in a cable tie like way. Not sure what they're called though?

[Soulfish]

I'm glad you can remember all of that, I certainly can't Spent many an hour trying to remember but never managed it. When it come to actually using it we had Google to hand

Google was always a godsend when looking up resistor codes

[matt40k]

Grey patch > switch (or machine > point)
purple ILO
red staff internet
blue pupil internet
orange to server

green is normally for crossover

All non-grey\green have paper labels with sellotape (sp?) over the top or with on of those dyno thingys.

Basically anything purple your die by techy hands, anything red by teacher, anything blue, well you might live... maybe, anything orange, well... depends what it is (there is (at least) two per server).

Grey... well, depends again, you might get lucky, or you might not make it out of room