James Bensley wrote:
In my opinion the circuit ID should be an abitrary (but unique) value and nothing more. As Nick suggested start at 1 and go up. If your company is called ABC Ltd then maybe have your first circuit ID as ABC00000001 and count up from there, it's as simple as that.
there are a lot of ways of handling this, which broadly speaking break down into whether you want to encode data in your circuit ID or whether you want it to act as nothing more than an index on a database table. Regardless of what way you go about things, there are some parallel issues, including whether you want inline checksumming, whether you want random value increases or +1 increases, and whether you want an alphanumeric or strictly numeric ID. Alphanumeric can allow unique prefixes or suffixes to help identify who owns a circuit ID or what type it is, at the complexity of adding identifiers which can be misinterpreted over the phone. There are differing opinions on whether other information such as service type, node location, speed, etc should be encoded in the service name. Things that most people generally agree on include: - carefully splitting out service types. E.g. a fibre cable to a location is one ID; a wavelength on that service is another ID of another type; an IP transit service on that wave is a third ID, etc. - don't reuse IDs, ever. There are plenty of numbers out there. - don't change from one ID mechanism to another, if possible. Otherwise, for every well-reasoned suggestion to use a specific format, there are other well-reasoned arguments to do things in a different way. Choose one and stick with it. Nick