I currently work in academic HPC, and I've found myself having a somewhat rare opportunity to influence how the organization approaches cable management. (The regular net tech guy retired, and hasn't been replaced yet.) In particular, I am reconsidering our approach to cable management and tracking, especially in the compute/data-center itself (the office cabling has a different system I'm not concerned about).

Background: We have mostly cisco switches and routers. The cables I'm concerned about are mostly UTP carring ethernet, but there is some trunk fiber ethernet between switches and routers. We are rather short-staffed, so it is difficult to keep up on any cable management plan.

There isn't much to the current system: Basically, each cable is (ideally) labeled on each end with the rack location, hostname, and port on the other end. I say "ideally" because each time a switch gets moved, half the cables do not get properly relabeled.

In theory, the switches and routers all have port descriptions in software, with basically the same information that is on the cables. In practice, about half the port descriptions are out of date or have not been set at all.

That's about it. So, I'm wondering if I should simply aggressively work to get the current system up-to-date, or if we shouldn't consider some other system. I've read that some places use a unique cable numbering system, with some kind of master database of what cable connects to what. But I'm not sure how to implement that in a way that is easy to use out on the floor, and doesn't just create another database likely to get out of date. I'd appreciate hearing more about how others handle this.

Stateless,

You are fighting a battle I feel like I have been losing for a long time..

What I have personally had the most luck with is putting src & dest ports in both of the the port descriptions (src & dest). Since I do the majority of the configuration, I can keep up with this part the easiest. I have never had much luck with labeling the cable itself because it always seemed like someone else moved the cables and then called me for configuration. I can change my part immediately, but getting someone else on the other end to not only commit to relabeling the cable, but also actually following through with it has been next to impossible; therefore, it leaves a buch of mislabled cables that are even harder to trace.

The easy answer to your question is that I typically find the answer is unique to each engineer in each location.

Good Luck!!