Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ask Slashdot: Documenting a Tangle of Network Devices?

Posted by timothy on from the just-work-on-your-mnemonics dept.

LoudMusic writes "One of the many tasks of a network administrator is documenting the network so that other members of the administration and support teams can find devices on the network. Currently my organization uses Excel spreadsheets to handle this, and it's invariably error ridden. We also save a new file with the date in the name each time an update is made. I'd like to move this to a more intelligent database system, but the driving force for keeping it in spreadsheets is the ability to take the document offline, edit it, then upload this new revision to the file server when we have a connection again. Our clients often don't have reliable internet connections, especially when we're tearing their network apart and rebuilding it. The information we're currently documenting about an individual device are: device name, device model, description, IP address, MAC address, physical location, uplink switch & port, and VLAN. What tools exist that would allow us to have multiple users make updates both online and offline simultaneously, and synchronize changes into both the online and offline copies?"

3 of 165 comments (clear)

  1. Google Docs! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you tried Google Docs?

    -Free
    -Easy to use and familiar look to "office" users
    -Only requires a web browser or a smartphone
    -Automatically saves revisions of the same file so you don't have to manually version
        (Come on! It's 2012 out there and IT people are still manually versioning files? Have you been trapped in a time loop?)
    -Collaborative so allows simultaneous edits of the same document (yes, simultaneous. No weird concept of lock-and-release queue.)
    -Now has an offline mode that automatically reconciles edits when online again

    I suppose that fits the bill for your description. Have fun.

  2. OCS Inventory-NG by Nimey · · Score: 5, Informative

    OCS Inventory is a database and reporting interface that will keep an up-to-date database of the devices on your network(s). It's got a server component that runs on Linux or Windows (Linux is recommended) and client agents that run on Windows, *nix, and MacOS X. The client agents also use nmap to scan for other types of nodes, such as routers and printers. It's very slick; I've used it for six years for my job, and we currently track over 500 computers plus a few other devices through nmap.

    The whole thing is GPL, and you can opt for a support contract.

    It can also integrate with another package called GLPI, which among other things handles trouble tickets and is also Free.

    --
    Hail Eris, full of mischief...

    E pluribus sanguinem
  3. If it's a real enterprise system... try NetMRI by ksharif · · Score: 5, Informative

    Disclaimer, I'm biased because I work on the product, but this is the exact use case we've designed the product for. http://www.infoblox.com/en/products/netmri.html?utm_expid=7390868-7&utm_referrer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.website-unavailable.com%2Fmain%3Fq%3Dnetmri%26d%3Dwww.infoblox.comhttp%26oq%3DInfo%2BBlox%2BCom%2BHTTP%2BInfo%2BBlox%2BComen%2BResource%2BProduct%2BDemo%2BNet%2BMRI%2BDownload%2BHTML%2BNet%2BProduct%2BDemos%2BResources%2BInfo%2BBlox%2BCom