Ask Slashdot: Documenting a Tangle of Network Devices?

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?"

Comments

Enterprise DBMS

[vlm]

Currently my organization uses Excel spreadsheets to handle this, and it's invariably error ridden.

In the real world, away from press releases, sadly, Excel is the real world enterprise DBMS for almost all corporations.

I also worked for a place that used a word processor for DBMS.

No codd normal forms, and joins/selects are done completely by intern / human power.

Basically all the "paperless office" did was make it slightly easier to do existing paper processes. No core technological/process changes.