[plug] Cable Management Software

[Patrick Coleman]

On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:48 PM, Tim <weirdit at gmail.com> wrote:
> To be honest, not knowing how elegant these systems become, I don't
> know how complex the system could be.
> >From my basic understanding, any cable can only have 2 termination
> points, at each end. And each termination point is a device that can
> connect up to say 100 other termination points.
> So what is the basic information you want stored?
> One table for cables
> Cable ID, End Point A, End Point B, Building Number, Etc etc
>
> One table for devices
> Device ID, Number of End Points, Location (Physical), Location
> (Network, e.g. Address)

That's basically it. It's complicated a tad by edge cases like you can
plug cables into other cables (like what Adam is doing with the fibre
patching), and multiple cables can form one logical link (in a link
aggregate).

> Then it's simply a matter of writing the interface to add cables and
> devices and then write a few lookups to extract the data required. I
> guess if there is advanced network routing information you want
> stored, that could become a little difficult for doing simple SQL
> lookups to work out routing tables, but I can see it's rather easy to
> find all cables in Building X, or to check if there is a network path
> between 2 points.
> If what I've described is all it really is, then it should be fairly
> simple to knock something up quickly. Otherwise, what other
> information is needed?

So in a fit of django last night I knocked up a model in everyone's
favorite web framework: see subversion at
<https://svn.ld.net.au/blinken/ipdb/trunk>. It's just the model in
model.py at the moment, all the rest of the stuff there is old code
that won't work. It's also very alpha at the moment - just the models
edited by the admin interface, but it should be possible to customise
it and add some smarter logic pretty easily.

-Patrick



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