NetLay: A diagram you can read like a document
The connection diagram fanned lines out of every switch until nobody could follow it, so I stopped drawing a graph and started drawing a tree instead.
Category
App Dev
Building software: architecture, tooling and hard-won lessons.
NetLay: Sixty VMs and one card
Groups worked beautifully until the first real server farm went into one, which needed two fixes, stop counting things twice and stop drawing lists nobody reads.
NetLay: Up is not the same as working
A printer that answers ping with its print service hung is the most annoying green dot there is, so devices got service port checks and the map got a third colour.
NetLay: Making the switches introduce themselves
Why nmap was the obvious answer and the wrong one for now, four sources of evidence that need nothing installed, and an SNMP walk that places a switch's devices for you.
NetLay: Drawing the air, wireless clients and device groups
A map built entirely around cables meets the half of the network that has none, and the same trick turns out to fix the clutter problem as well.
NetLay: Learning the network with nothing but what Windows already has
When the switch exports never arrive, a scanner built from ping, the ARP table, reverse DNS, a vendor list, a few TCP ports and about two hundred lines of hand-written SNMP.
NetLay: Type an IP, see the map jump
A search box that indexes everything on the map, focusing a single VLAN, saved views, and a wall mode that turns the whole thing into something you glance at.
NetLay: The bit between the switch and the desk
Patch panels, outlets and cable IDs, because the switch port tells you where the configuration lives and not where to go with a tester.
NetLay: Does the map still tell the truth?
The reality check, which runs the switch importer in compare mode and tells you every place your map and your switches disagree, with a one-click fix on each.
NetLay: Teaching it to read a running-config
Building a switch importer before the real exports arrived, parsing Cisco output without a library, and why nothing gets written until you have seen the plan.