[plug] Cable Management Software

[Paul]

Yeah, I thought of that too. At the time I designed it there was nothing
on the market like it. Now? Dunno really. The whole system is heavily
integrated with asset control and server management now.

Hook


On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 19:37 +0900, Paul Antoine wrote:
> 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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