[Sussex] Network Diagraming

[Paul Tansom]

On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 21:28 +0100, Stephen Williams wrote: 
> On Wed, 2005-04-27 at 20:01 +0100, Matthew Macdonald-Wallace wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > Does anyone know of a tool similar to Viso that will automatically
> > discover and map a network?  
> > 
> > I'm going back into IT and although it means crossing to the darkside
> > (MCP/MCSA/MSDBA), I would love to have an arsenal of tools that will
> > help me install and maintain networks that are opensource and run on my
> > Gentoo Laptop.
> > 
> 
> emerge iptraf ethereal nessus
> 
> and then have a look in net-analyzer branch of the portage tree for
> anything else that takes your fancy.
> 
> For diagramming purposes app-office/dia seems to be worth a look.
> 
> Steve W.
> 
> > All suggestions greatfully accepted, all flames will be redirected
> > to /dev/null... :p
> > 

I've not tried this packages since it was called NetSaint, but Nagios
may be of use. It is primarily a network monitoring tool, but as a side
effect of this (to some extent) it does allow you to produce network
diagrams. I'm not sure as it automatically discovers a network though -
but then I didn't realise Visio did either! My copy is version 4.5 iirc.
I started using it at around version 1 (ish) when it was provided on a
single floppy stuck to the front of a copy of Computer Shopper (so
that's going back a bit now!). Since I wasn't a heavy user of it by any
stretch of the imagination I was able to write it off completely when
Microsoft bought them out - I may be at odds with many people, but I
don't find any Microsoft products are designed for ease of use(*), and
if they take over a product I will class it as the kiss of death if it
was originally a good one!

(*) I won't dwell on it too much, but with Windows 3.1 I was using an
Amiga which was light years ahead in capability and ease of use. Windows
95 was a poor mans OS/2 and NT never improved enough to change that. Now
XP is orders of magnitude slower to use than a properly configured Linux
desktop (not commenting on KDE or Gnome as I used neither). Office has
always been an obstacle to overcome before getting the document or data
in the format I want. My brain obviously just works differently! Either
that or Microsoft is the ultimate example of marketing and luck being
able to sell a vastly inferior product :)

OK, bad day so far, I'll go back to lurking again or I'll move onto the
sad state of the Red Hat distribution - another thorn in my side :(

-- 
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. | http://www.aptanet.com/