[plug] Cable Management Software

[Adam Hewitt]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 3:57 PM, Adrian Woodley <Adrian at diskworld.com.au> wrote:
> Patrick Coleman wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Adam Hewitt <ahewitt at theozhewitts.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Hi All,
>>>
>>> I have been tasked with conducting an audit of our fibre network at
>>> work. This is likely to take me a couple of months and I am likely to
>>> feel like throwing myself off a building before its finished.
>>> Therefore if I am going to do it now, I want to do it right to prevent
>>> the next person from having to go through the same task...
>>>
>>> What I would like to do is put this information into a database of
>>> some description that is accessible to anyone who is likely to be
>>> making or coordinating changes to the fibre connections. Does anyone
>>> have any recommendations for packages that do this out of the box?
>>> Although I would prefer a LAMP setup to store and present this data, I
>>> really don't have the time (nor the permission) to plan and execute it
>>> all myself. I am really looking for something free, open source that I
>>> can just start using.
>>>
>>
>> I've hit very much the same problem, except with CAT6 patches in
>> building wiring closets (and fibre to some degree, I guess). Currently
>> the documentation is in a pile of spreadsheets on my laptop, as I had
>> a bit of a look a few months ago and wasn't able to find anything that
>> would do it nicely.
>>
>> I was planning to write up something in django when I get some free
>> time (hur), but if someone else has a recommendation that would be
>> awesome.
>>
>> -Patrick
>>
>
> While not a particularly elegant solution, couldn't a wiki be used to
> map/track this information?
>
> Device/ports are pages, with the cables being the hyper-links between them.
>
> Switches might be interesting to work out - maybe use individual anchors
> within the page for each switch-port?
>
> Once the wiki is populated, a web/wiki trawler/mapper/analyser should be
> able to visualise the network map.
>
> This is largely off the top of my head and there may well be some huge
> problem I haven't thought about. It is however easy to setup and start
> using, even at a personal desktop level.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adrian

This was briefly discussed, however we have 64 sites, each with
multiple patch panels (up to 9 at some sites) with each panel having
up to 48 fibre patch ports....that is a *lot* of wiki pages using your
method described...I know that you could then script around this as
well, but something that can provide the fibre pathing for one device
all the way through to the device on the other end (maybe through 5
buildings and 7 pieces of cable) would be nice....or show all cables
located in building X etc.