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by INTPenis
1654 days ago
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Seeing these Excel pros compete reminds me of when I found an old server inventory system at work. Someone had in Excel+Visio+VBS made a system where you could see a top-down map of our DCs, and server cabinets. Each cabinet had an alert light indicating if there were any alerts on any server in that cabinet (fetched from Xymon), you could click each cabinet to get a front view of all servers, with graphics of server fronts reflecting the vendor and model of the server. The person who made this had quit a long time ago, no one was quite sure of who it was. And of course things had slowly started to break down, like API connections, alerts, it wasn't up to date, but wow. It blew my mind. |
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I had an app for this on my Macintosh(AppleTalk!)network, by a great bunch of folks at a company named Neon. (I believe that was the name of the company, or maybe the app.)
Basic reporting was a GUI front end for SNMP queries. It had a great packet sniffer, too.
We had a senior network manager who ran all of the Ethernet cable, and maintained all of that infrastructure. A really sharp fellow, really knew cabling and networking, routing topologies etc. At one point, he was trying to sort out a problem in network authorization that had been escalated to him from application support team, because it seemed to occur on a particular network segment. He had a lunchbox PC with some dedicated network hardware and an application, a turnkey system from somewhere, cost ten thousand bucks. He was working the problem, capturing the packets... I was able to use my damn Macintosh setup to identify the authorization packets in like five minutes.
We all went with Windows NT soon after that. It has fantastic monitoring capabilities, and I bought Visio before they were re-absorbed back into Microsoft. Network maps were fun to set up with a bit of Visual Basic.
I was a horrible, horrible programmer, but I loved network administration.