Saw this here on facebook today and thought wow, thats a great idea for use of old bread tags, or grabbing a few extras from stores that have them out in the open in the bakery section with pick your own donuts or bagels etc, in which you could buy some food and grab some extra tags   

My system that I use for knowing what plug end goes to what with the many systems I have uses colored zip ties. I have color coded them by for example if I have 20 plugs to account for, and I have 5 colors of zip ties to pick from I will start the first 5 cords using just 1 zip tie each at the plug end and the other end that is plugged into the device. So for example my computer has an orange zip tie from looking at the cord going into the power supply, I can look in the mass of wires plugged into multiple UPS's and see the one out of the many black power cables that has the single orange zip tie and know that that is the one I want to unplug or verify that its plugged into the battery backup side vs just the surge only side of the UPS. For the cords beyond the first 5 that are single color, I use color combinations at each end of the cord such as pink and blue, etc to make the color code of them unique to the other cords I have.

This for me has worked for about 10 years in knowing what plug goes to what device. And even though I saw this bread TAG method, I am going to stick with the zip tie color code method because the tags wont fall off or have to be relabeled later when cables are repurposed.

Prior to this late 1980s to early 90s, I tried using the paper tags with the small loop of string in which you write on the paper tag what it is, but they would somehow get damaged or disappear from the cords.

In the early 90s I then switched to the idea of printing out a list of cables to identify and cutting out the text as thin strips and applying the strips of paper along the length of cord near the plug and wrapping that paper with wide clear packing tape to BOND it to the cord. The problem I ran into with this was 3 problems. #1, the tape I bought after a few years was starting to yellow the ink from the dot matrix printer that printed the paper seemed to bleed with the gum from the tape and so it turned yellow and blurry after about 4 years. #2, the tapes adhesive would lose its bond with the cable because the gum adhesive has aged and is breaking down, so the label with ring of clear packing tape was able to slide on the cable and when it moved and you touched the cable, the cable was all tacky to the touch. #3, when a piece of equipment was disposed of but yet the cord remained, you had to relabel the cord or else there would be confusion when looking at all the plugs ( yes I did this to myself once and had to track the cord all the way back to figure out which one it was.)

So I decided to finally come up with a zip tie color code method that works no matter where that power cord would me moved to when repurposed later. The colors at each end would remain the same, zip ties last a very long time, and because its a color code identification method there is no need to have to remove text and correct for what it was now powering.

When I was working as a system admin at my prior job we bought a cable label maker and this worked great for the network cables to identify them among the hundreds of same colored patch cables etc. And this label maker method is good if the cables will not change identity in which you need to relabel them or set yourself up for FUN when only 1 end of the cable was labelled correctly and the other end still has the old label affixed to it.

 I had an intern working with me at my last job that I gave the label maker to and gave him the fun of identifying and labeling all the patch cables in our network closet IDF's which came from the MDF in the basement. This was just a job to give him something to do to pass time on days that we had a light load of work and I couldnt have him sitting around getting paid surfing the web waiting for a help desk call, and it was a much needed tedious task to be completed. I am not faulting him for the mistake, but when looking at a mass of same colored patch and network bundles in a closet it is easy to start with 1 end and try to track it through the spaghetti of cables and end up with a different cable at the other end because it just happens when not extremely careful. I showed him the tug method to know that you have the same cable at both ends of your hands when the cable is INTERTWINED with the mass of others and for the most part he got all cables correct except for 2 cables out of the hundreds that he had to identify and label ( * or we never moved others that were labelled wrong while I was there, that someone else had to deal with later or will have to deal with at a future time ). When the HR woman wanted to move to the other office with a window view to the outside world and a door to close for confidential discussions from that of prior a small cubicle space which wasnt private enough, I went in and had to move her patch cable for her VoIP phone to another jack so that her phone would work in the new office. The VoIP network was not the same network as the corporate network and so I ended up with a VoIP phone that was dead when plugging it into the jack. The reason for why the phone was dead was for 2 reasons, it required PoE ( Power over Ethernet ) + It required to be on the Phone Network to function with the Shoretel System.  I plugged my laptop into the port and it was live, so I made the mistake of assuming that there must be a wiring issue with the pins used for the PoE and thats why the phone is dead. What I should have DONE is taken a look to see what network I was on as for if I looked to see what network my laptop was connecting to on that jack I would have realized I was on the wrong network and so the patch cable was wrong. I got my patch cable tester and stuck the loop back on the rack for that jack and rung out the cat5e cable from the office jack to that rack and it came up healthy with all 4 pairs correct. I then thought maybe the patch cable is damaged somehow and so I went to replace it, and when I replaced it I noticed that the labels mismatched at both ends. I also realized that the other end of the cable in the IDF was plugged into a Cisco managed switch and was not plugged into the 24 port PoE switch, and so I knew that I found just the beginning of the problem. To not get confused as to what cable was what since I didnt have the label maker with me I ended up grabbing a red cable I had out of my laptop bag and using that as a temporary patch cable to get the HR womans phone back up and running. And then I was on the hunt for the other cable that was labelled wrong. I started at that 24 port PoE switch because I knew that the cable she had been using prior must still be plugged into that and sure enough there it was. So i then grabbed another cable from my computer bag which was a 50ft grey cable and used that as a temp cable to get her computer connected in the new office. Then after hours when she left at 5pm, I went back in there with label maker and replaced the 2 temp cables with 2 normal patch cables that were labeled correctly.

Figured I would share this here in case there are better methods etc or other info from others to share on this, as well as this might help someone who needs to manage their cable identification which they either dont already have in place, or are looking for a good method.

https://www.facebook.com/MOJOOutdoorsTV/photos/a.166982872594.131393.158931732594/10152130129337595/?type=1&theater



[attachment deleted by admin to conserve space]When I worked as a "prototype wireman" in the 1970s among other things I used to make up patch leads for a military contract and we used to identify them using heat-shrinkable yellow sleeving, and special no-fade, no-smudge marker pens. The unshrunk sleeve was big enough to go over an already attached connector if necessary, and then you just blew on it with a hair dryer and watched it shrink tight. 3M make a range of tubing called GTI-3000 in various colours and sizes from 1.5 mm to 39 mm with an original to shrunk ratio of 3:1. In fact there are lots of products of this type and you can buy packs of tubing/sleeving on eBay and you can even get printable types and desktop thermal transfer printers are available, or you can get pens (that one in the picture looks very much like a Sharpie)






Neat ... didnt know about heat shrink for labelling.