Clickable HTML network diagrams with draw.io

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John Herbert (@mrtugs) over at https://movingpackets.net just recently published a blog article that I felt was extremely clever and helpful. He created a clickable HTML diagram for his home network so that he could both illustrate to his wife how good of a network admin he really is and make it easier to manage the devices on his network. The only problem I saw with John’s post is that you must own Omnigraffe, a diagramming tool only supported on macOS and iOS. If you visit their website, there is a free 14-day trial to give it a spin, but it is pay-to-play software. Enter draw.io from JGraph Ltd.:

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Ghosts in the network

It all started with an e-mail from a co-worker on a recent Saturday afternoon, shortly after we finished performing Windows updates on all of our servers. It read something like this:

“Syslog server’s C: drive ran out of space so I created an additional drive with 20GB of space and moved all of the logs to it.”

Now I’ve only been with this new company for 4 months now, but one of the first things I did when I began learning the network was to take a look at our syslog server to see how it was configured and for baselining how many logs in an hour and day were normal for our network. So when I saw that the drive ran out of space with the amount of syslogs normally generated per day, it immediately raised an alarm.

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SolarWinds Ambassador

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In January, I was honored with the offer to become a SolarWinds “Geek Speak” Ambassador for the month of February. Being a SolarWinds Ambassador consists of writing 4 blog posts (1 per week) about topics that interest you, in relation to IT as a whole. My particular interests that I chose to write about revolved around networking monitoring. Although my schedule was slated to be very hectic that month, I decided to take on the challenge as it was something I had never done before and the opportunity wasn’t guaranteed in the future. I’m so glad I did it. If you’re interested, the four posts are below:

What’s most important to you when choosing an NMS?

Get with the flow… with NetFlow!

Configuration management… More than meets the eye

Network Discovery: Manual vs Automated

Disclaimer: While I was paid for the content I wrote, I was not swayed in any manner to write content that was favorable for SolarWinds or it’s products.

The Pay It Forward scholarship continues

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I have a great announcement to make that is long overdue! The Pay It Forward (PIF) scholarship has its second recipient.

Sometime shortly after the new year, I was mulling over whether I would write a post asking for applications for this year’s scholarship. I had just started my new job and I knew that this year would be extremely busy for me, both personally and professionally. I wasn’t sure if I would be able to devote the funds or time to this valiant cause, however, I could not refuse this highly motivated individual. Continue reading →

I’m going to Cisco Live US!