How I tend to label bad hardware

February 16, 2018

Every so often I wind up dealing with some piece of hardware that's bad, questionable, or apparently flaky. Hard disks are certainly the most common thing, but the most recent case was a 10G-T network card that didn't like coming up at 10G. For a long time I was sort of casual about how I handled these; generally I'd set them aside with at most a postit note or the like. As you might suspect, this didn't always work out so great.

These days I have mostly switched over to doing this better. We have a labelmaker (as everyone should), so any time I wind up with some piece of hardware I don't trust any more, I stick a label on it to mark it and say something about the issue. Labels that have to go on hardware can only be so big (unless I want to wrap the label all over whatever it is), so I don't try to put a full explanation; instead, my goal is to put enough information on the label so I can go find more information.

My current style of label looks broadly like this (and there's a flaw in this label):

volary 2018-02-12
no 10g problem

The three important elements are the name of the server the hardware came from (or was in when we ran into problems), the date, and some brief note about what the problem was. Given the date (and the machine) I can probably find more details in our email archives, and the remaining text hopefully jogs my memory and helps confirm that we've found the right thing in the archives.

As my co-workers gently pointed out, the specific extra text on this label is less than idea. I knew what it meant, but my co-workers could reasonably read it as 'no problem with 10G' instead of the intended meaning of 'no 10g link', ie the card wouldn't run a port at 10G when connected to our 10G switches. My takeaway is that it's always worth re-reading a planned label and asking myself if it could be misread.

A corollary to labeling bad hardware is that I should also label good hardware that I just happen to have sitting around. That way I can know right away that it's good (and perhaps why it's sitting around). The actual work of making a label and putting it on might also cause me to recycle the hardware into our pool of stuff, instead of leaving it sitting somewhere on my desk.

(This assumes that we're not deliberately holding the disks or whatever back in case we turn out to need them in their current state. For example, sometimes we pull servers out of service but don't immediately erase their disks, since we might need to bring them back.)

Many years ago I wrote about labeling bad disks that you pull out of servers. As demonstrated here, this seems to be a lesson that I keep learning over and over again, and then backsliding on for various reasons (mostly that it's a bit of extra work to make labels and stick them on, and sometimes it irrationally feels wasteful).

PS: I did eventually re-learn the lesson to label the disks in your machines. All of the disks in my current office workstation are visibly labeled so I can tell which is which without having to pull them out to check the model and serial number.

Written on 16 February 2018.
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Last modified: Fri Feb 16 00:52:35 2018
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