Network diagrams


Written on October 12, 2005 – 5:38 pm | by Sahmeepee

Today I made a start on a diagram of the school network, with the intention of including all switches, routers, servers and “network appliances” (CCTV servers, NAS boxes). It’s surprising what you find out when you examine things in detail! It’s definitely been a worthwhile exercise already.

Previously I had made diagrams with 3com network supervisor (free version, closed source), but it doesn’t really give you any control other than rearranging the items it’s detected on your network. On the plus side it has autodiscovery and nifty features like documenting which server/PC/printer is connected to which physical port on a (3com) switch. Very nifty, but not flexible enough.

The software I’ve been using this time around is Network Notepad (free, closed source, win9x - XP). Although some aspects of the interface are a little clunky, it does everything I need it to and more. Bear in mind that it is a drawing and documenting tool - it doesn’t have the autodiscovery features available in expensive commercial products. You can enter the IP addresses for NICs in manually though, so it will produce fairly meaningful documentation if you put the time in.

Make sure you download and install the additional object libraries to supplement the basic ones that come with the installer. Unfortunately there aren’t any 48 port switch objects at the moment. If someone points me in the direction of a free tool for making wmf files, I’ll tackle that myself.

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  1. 2 Responses to “Network diagrams”

  2.   By David on Nov 14, 2005 | Reply

    Have you checked out ratemynetworkdiagram.com it has over 300 example diagrams online.

    The diagrams very in quality, but it might give you an idea or two on how to present your final network data in graphical form.

    Hope this helps.

    David

  3.   By Sahmeepee on Nov 14, 2005 | Reply

    I had a look at it a long while ago, but it’s come on a fair bit since. My little effort seems a bit feeble now though! Not to the extent that I’m going to rush out and buy Visio mind you.

    I’ve definitely found a few ideas from the diagrams on there about how to (visually) segregate different areas of the network. Still no luck on the wmf editing front, but I live in hope :)

    Thanks David

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