Re: Documentation of switch maps

[Adam Armstrong <lists () memetic 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 spreadsheet 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.  Curious 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 this document and pull up any switch and look at the port and be able to 
> see 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 connectivity however their cisco infrastructure does 
> have labels on every port that goes to a named device outside of the DHCP pools.  Thoughts?
>   
If they're cisco or similar switches, make sure your port descriptions 
are correct, and keep configuration archives. Collect the port 
configuration/status with snmp and populate it into a database, that way 
you can generate whatever information you want in whatever format and 
it's accurate, which it won't be if you're expecting someone to update a 
spreadsheet.

adam.