Monday, May 02, 2005
Anyone up for hyperlinked network maps?
Along with setting up NTP and SNMP on all the servers here, I've also been documenting the
network here at The Company (not that Dan hasn't done that, but he's
responsible for the overall network and tends to focus on the switches and
routers—I've been concentrating on the hosts I manage plus the switches
they're hooked into). In doing this, I came across a drawing program for
Unix called Tgif, an Xlib based (woo hoo!
no huge external libraries to worry about! Yea! No insanely large amount
of dependencies! Woo hoo!) interactive 2-D drawing program.
I've spent the past few days with it, drawing the network—the rounded rectangles are network switches (the one in the upper left has two VLANs, one with 18 ports in green, and a second one with 6 ports in blue), the larger black squares are computers. Red squares designate off-page (as it were) connections. Red lines designate switch-to-switch connections. The purple square encloses the office machines and the turquoise squares are some comments about the two upper switches (yes, the image is shrunk).
But it was only when I was writing this entry did I realize that Tgif has hypertext capability (has since 1994! Ken! Why didn't you find this program?) and I've been going through the demo pages with the Tgif program since (and want to go back actually … so … um … end of entry).
