[112457] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Documentation of switch maps
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Adam Armstrong)
Thu Feb 26 18:56:09 2009
Date: Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:55:38 +0000
From: Adam Armstrong <lists@memetic.org>
To: Blake Pfankuch <bpfankuch@cpgreeley.com>
In-Reply-To: <01759D50DC387C45A018FE1817CE27D7540E0F4395@CPExchange1.cpgreeley.com>
Cc: "nanog@nanog.org" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces@nanog.org
Blake Pfankuch wrote:
> Howdy.
>
> Had a customer come to me this morning who wanted to create a document =
for their switching infrastructure and thought I would bounce it off the =
rest of the world on how you usually do this. Typically I use a spreadsh=
eet with outlines to define the "switch" and then outlines for the ports =
and color coding for vlan's as well as a description of the port. Curiou=
s what other people are doing, as this would be a huge undertaking for a =
customer who is using an entire /19 of rfc 1918 ip addresses and has well=
over 150 switches and 40 active vlans. The want to be able to look at t=
his document and pull up any switch and look at the port and be able to s=
ee what vlan the port is on, as well as what device it is connected to as=
well as port channel membership, trunks and other fun things like that. =
Needless to say their documentation is lacking on the physical connectiv=
ity however their cisco infrastructure does have labels on every port tha=
t goes to a named device outside of the DHCP pools. Thoughts?
> =20
If they're cisco or similar switches, make sure your port descriptions=20
are correct, and keep configuration archives. Collect the port=20
configuration/status with snmp and populate it into a database, that way =
you can generate whatever information you want in whatever format and=20
it's accurate, which it won't be if you're expecting someone to update a =
spreadsheet.
adam.
