Question: Managing Network infrastructrure metadata with Linux?
Posted by hq4ever on Mon 21 Aug 2006 at 08:01
The one absolute truth every sysadmin confronts is "I need to document my network infrastructure, How do I do it?" I hope, with your help, to get this question solved here, now, today, once and for all.
How do you Debian sysadmins manage your networks diagrams? What tools are you using? What guidelines do you follow? What "hard experience based truths" will you be willing to share with us, children?
I'm looking for software to create Network Maps. I'm looking for software to display Network Topology. I'm looking for software to manage hardware inventory
Generally speaking, I'm on the quest to find any bit of software that would be useful for rapid and efficient network structure documentation and administration.
Wait, there's more: I would really love it if this software could generate output in "common format", so that even if it would get sent by mail to the alternative OS, it's user won't need to download zillion over blown executable to view it.
Google, forums, IRC, Wikipedia, Mailing Lists and apt-cache have given me this so far :
None of them feels like the right tool for the job.
Thank You for your help
Maxim
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Dia has had some improvements recently (past few months) that make it more suitable for diagramming networks (the "cisco" icons are in color, there's semi-working auto object-to-object lines). There are many problems with it, but it's unfortunately one of the better ones out there. I like that its save file is XML+gzip, as it lends itself to XSLT processing easily.
For larger-scale diagrams, there are auto-generated graphs from the graphviz suite (you enter the relations of things "Machine_a -> router_b" and it will try and draw a sane graph of them all).
I recently discovered tellico - a well-designed app for managing book, video and music collections. It's incredibly flexible and I have little doubt that a hardware inventory could be made in it rapidly. For music CDs, books etc., it can scrape data from Amazon and import it into the library. I bet the scraper could be customized for hardware vendors' sites, too (to keep device specs. always on hand). For CDs, it even has a neat standalone HTML+Javascript+CSS generator that lets you publish your collection in an accessible manner.
Obviously this doesn't directly answer your questions, but hopefully it'll help. I'm a programmer - not a network engineer, but I do have to maintain all my Debian machines myself (until we hire Debian-friendly IT guys).
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You need to draw the diagrams but it will generate HTML
and you can link to vendor sites. I used it with M$ W2000.
It might run under Wine - I have not checked.
I used it "dynamically" - updating the html using
snmp to keep track of hardware.
I found it useful.
Dan in Colorado
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+ It's GNU Open Source
+ Packages for Debian, RedHat and FreeBSD
+ activly maintained
- very cisco oriented.
- not for the faint of heart
it contains network topology mapper, traffic grapher, hardware tracker, inventory and logistics, sms/email alerts, service monitor.
It may be overkill...
scrren shots http://metanav.ntnu.no/moin.cgi/NAVScreenShots
wiki/homepage http://metanav.ntnu.no/
feature list http://metanav.ntnu.no/moin.cgi/NAVFeature
Ronny
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http://www.insightix.com/products/enterprise-collector/what-s-new -in-2-0.aspx
Unfortunately it is not free.
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