Labeling cables

Our network cabling leaves a lot to be desired. There are cables here, there and everywhere. Half time when we are working in the network room, we are tracing wires to and from, etc.. At a previous job, we had some nice cable labels. They were adhered to the cable very well, didn't fall off, had to be ripped off to come off. The label machine I have now is a Dyno cheapo and the tape doesn't stick to shit, much less a cat 5 cable.

What do you guys use for labeling? I've tried a sharpie, but I need more info: from location (either host name/port or patch panel/port). I don't mind using a laser printer if the labels are worth using. I've seen a few options, but not sure how they stand up. I've seen an industrial label printer for ~$400, but that's not really in the budget for this. I'm looking at <$100 if possible.

We use Brother P-touch 1/2 inch labels with Panduit Brady Markers. We slice the brady markers in half so you get two labels out of one if you will. We do not wrap the label around the cable so you have to rotate the cable in your hand to read it. We "flag" label it so the labels hangs off the wire like a little flag.

Cheap solution : For now I use a standard label maker (Symbol something-or-other that supports 2-line printing), then wrap in Dymo Self-Laminating Vinyl (write on) labels. The dymo labels are like $8 for 50. That's for servers and important stuff.
For other runs on the patch panel we just mark both ends with the same unique number in marker on the write-on labels.

Pretty sure you can get self-laminating sheets that you run through a laser printer as well, but I've never used them. Something about running vinyl sheets through a hot fuser doesn't sound right to me. Maybe they're injet-only.

+1 for the Brother P-Touch series. The nicer ones have all sorts of cool features for batching incremental print values, rotating the text, repeating, etc.

There was just a thread on this very subject on 5/17.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1693981

I've had the best results with laser self-laminating and Ksun BEE3 heatshrink wrap.
For cable labels, the BEE3 is limited to 4 characters or 8 numerical digits per line (up to 4 lines).

You shouldn't have to rotate a cable to read the label. The text is normally printed lengthwise, left-to-right, across the cable's length.

klank said:

There was just a thread on this very subject on 5/17.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1693981

Click to expand...

Dammit. Don't know how I missed that. Answered my questions in that thread. Thanks! And thanks for not going ape shit at my apparent lack of searching (which I Googled, but didn't search the forum).

Closing post, due to all the answers are in linked thread.