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.
