[plug] Cable Management Software

[Paul Antoine]

My partner wrote a tool to do cable/rack/port inventory and management 
as one of his first tasks at iiNet... :-)

I have no idea if there are even commercial products to do this...

Paul

Patrick Coleman wrote:
> 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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