Turning to Open Source
The rise in scale and complexity of corporate networks hasn’t been matched by a proportional raise in IT budgets. So, to eschew the cost of commercial network management suites, IT departments are turning to open source. The result? Better tools, more widespread adoption, more participation — reminiscent of the rise of Linux itself.
In the summer of 2004, Richard Silver faced a hacking dilemma, literally.
In the course of a converting a large, open air workspace to cubicles, a construction crew at Silver’s East Alabama Medical Center had come up with a simple, albeit blunt, solution to a network wiring problem: instead of saving and labeling the pre-existing cables, workers simply chopped the entire trunk of incoming line at the ceiling and pulled new wire, even though keeping the existing wire would have added barely an hour’s work to construction. Silver, the medical center’s senior networking engineer, was then faced with the daunting task of hooking up 60 new employees with a similar number of dead lines still attached to the network. “I had no way of knowing if a port was off or if it had been cut off, ” says Silver, looking back.
Fortunately, Silver had
NetDisco (
http://netdisco.org/), an open source port monitoring tool. Taking advantage of the NetDisco’s built in archive feature, Silver was able to identify the ports that had shown up on network scans only a few weeks before. Writing those ports off as permanently “dark,” he was able to identify and label each new port, the machine it was attached to, and its relative location on the floor.
