NetLay: Checking the wiring rules
A model is only as good as the things it refuses, so I spent an evening attacking my own API with every bad idea I could think of, and two of them worked.
Posts
NetLay: A manual made of screenshots
Twenty posts of features and no way for a colleague to find any of them, so the app grew a guide, with pictures taken by a script so they cannot quietly go stale.
NetLay: Photos, and cables that go where the cables go
Two things you only miss standing in a comms room, a picture of the box you are hunting for and a line on the map that follows the route the real cable takes.
Migration Migraine
Moving from the old to the new..
NetLay: Looking at it properly
After nineteen features, a sense check of the screens rather than the code, driven by a headless browser taking thirty screenshots, and the dozen things it found that no test ever would.
Edge of Space, Part Five: Land Becomes Currency
The mine carpeting exploit comes home to roost in Edge of Space, so the ground got ore deposits, every extra copy of a building got dearer and fleets started burning fuel.
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.
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.