17-Dec-2012
Cable management
Recently, I talked about looking for a cable database, and ended up settling for RackTables. Since then, I've ended up becoming a very big fan of this Open Source freeware product.
My only complaint was that the product didn't support patch panel to patch panel cabling, but that I could live with it as I was planning on using multi-core cables for the back end wiring, so it would have been easy to figure out what went where.
However, since upgrading to RackTables 0.20.1 (which is a beta release, you have been warned) the software now supports the concept of plugins and I'm using linkmgmt to map the back end patch panel to patch panel wiring.
This allows you to see the entire circuit and also supports some fabulous mapping done with GraphViz that shows the physical cable for all object interfaces. Here's an example:
With Cacti and Nagios integration, this is a great framework to keep all the systems administration stuff in one place.
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