Edge of Space, Part Four: The Empire You Can Watch
The Command & Conquer half of Edge of Space finally arrives, buildings you place on real ground, miners who walk to work, weather, and a sky that gets dark.
Posts
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.
Edge of Space, Part Three: The Universe Gets People
Edge of Space had planets, fleets and battles but nobody to fight, so my OGAME inspired game got AI commanders, alliances and an economy built out of wreckage.
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.
NetLay: Remembering what happened, and asking the network how it got there
Ping history without a time-series database, alerts that tell you once instead of nagging, and a traceroute matched against the devices already on the map.
Edge of Space, Part Two: The Map I Should Have Drawn
The game design document that rescued Edge of Space, my OGAME inspired game, a systems map, MoSCoW in practice and the few numbers that quietly run all of it.