All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

Networking (the virtual variety)

Purdy on 2002-04-12T20:47:42

Prelude: This will help me tremendously for future reference.

With that said, I goof'ed yesterday. I yanked out a critical piece of networking hardware, assuming that it wouldn't make a difference and if it did, I further assumed that it would be easy to correct.

W R O N G ! ! !

I yanked out a Netgear switch, in an effort to relocate the switch to my office so that I could work on the new Linux box I've set up to become the new router/firewall/VPN/etc. No, I didn't jot down the wiring in case I was wrong. I further complicated it by putting the other wires in the other hubs and disconnecting dead ports (just as an example how fubar'd it got: I had one wire going from and to two ports on the same hub).

*sigh* - Now you're prolly saying "Run to your sysop!!" (a la the folks on IRC). Problem is, I am the sysop. :(

I'm feeling woefully inadequate and in over my head, when it comes to networking. It took me a frustrating 8 hours to put the pieces back together again, and I still believe there are (minor) networking problems.

Some of the IRC folks say, "Just think or write out what makes sense and it usually does, when it comes to wiring." That may be all well & good, but not when you have a heterogeneous set of computers, NICs and wiring that you can't easily trace from the computers to the hubs/switch (I adopted this hodge-podge/mess). I fixed one such problem this morning by plugging a line into one hub vs. the other (I guess one hub doesn't like the NIC on the other side). The network topography is just so strange - I'm half-expecting Tim Burton to direct a film about it. I got the internet (DSL) coming into a 5-port switch (Netgear FS105). Then I have two ports - one going to a CentreCOM 16-port hub and another going to an Asante 12-port hub.

Whatever - knock on wood and hope that nothing else fails on the network. I've since bought two books to help me w/ setting up the Linux box (Linux Firewalls and VPNs: A Beginner's Guide) - if you have any book or URL suggestions on how I can further learn Ethernet and/or TCP/IP networking, I'd love to hear 'em. Especially if they are comprehensive and targetted to networking dummies like myself. :)

Jason

Wiring is much easier with documentation

chicks on 2002-04-20T13:23:51

I know you said you couldn't trace a lot of the lines, but there are Cat5 tracing tools widely available. Once you've got everything documented, then you can attack things on paper before you p/o the users. Visio or dia is good for getting the big picture, but using a spreadsheet or database (whichever you're more comfortable with) to maintain details about every connection in the building is the most important thing. We maintain various text files and dia drawings in cvs for keeping track of wiring for a few consulting clients. It has made our life much easier.

I'd really like to see a perl/MySQL-based web app for keeping track of these sorts of things with bar code support and such. If anyone is interested in such a thing or knows of anything like that that I've missed, drop me a line.