Anyone up for hyperlinked network maps?

[A little slice of our network] [1] Along with setting up NTP (Network Time Protocol) [2] and SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) [3] 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 [4], 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 [5]—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 [6] (has since 1994! Ken! [7] 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).

[1] /boston/2005/05/02/lan.map.gif

[2] http://www.ntp.org/

[3] http://www.net-snmp.org/

[4] http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/

[5] /boston/2005/05/02/lan.map.gif

[6] http://bourbon.usc.edu:8001/tgif/mime.html

[7] http://www.kenmaier.com/

Gemini Mention this post

Contact the author