Lovelace recommends network configuration management

Lovelace, from the movie “Happy Feet”, is a rockhopper penguin, and a self-proclaimed prophet from Adélie Land who believes he has power and sex appeal. He charges the adélies one pebble in exchange for his prophecies. Lovelace is shown with a “sacred talisman” (plastic six-pack ring used to hold beverage cans together) around his neck. This becomes Lovelace’s undoing, as the ring becomes so tight that he can barely breathe. The “talisman” became caught around his neck on a swim near an abandoned whaling process plant which is littered with debris and is later ripped from his neck by pure chance. In this blog, Lovelace, is used the as the vehicle to provide advice. Lovelace is cheap as all he requires is a virtual pebble and being a penguin he loves open source. So here is the pebble and the question is, “what is the best tool for network problem management?” Now Lovelace used to be employed as the network administrator at the whaling plant and knew a thing or two about networks. The true answer, states Lovelace, is not in managing problems because by then the egg has hit the ice. A reactive tool set exists for managing problems but it is not the best. The question is around the BEST! The best is the proactive tool set. The search for this tool lies elsewhere in the field of configuration management. The fundamental root cause of the majority of network problems is inadequate configuration management. Lets explain. A large number of the causes of can be narrowed down to component failure, misconfigurations, carrier and service provider faults. All these trace a root cause back to inadequate configuration management. Component failure is usually old equipment that has failed and the configuration is not recorded and its warranty and maintenance schedule is not known. Misconfigurations occur as techies don’t document or record interrelationships. Carrier and service provider faults result from vendor management issues of agreements being unclear or not recorded. This scope of the issue is beyond that of the telnet jockey and “fly by the seat of your pants” problem management. Commercial vendors who sell expensive framework products need to hang their heads in shame. Their products are pretty much weak and damn difficult to implement. The cost is disproportionately high and the value limited. It seems that many have jumped onto the service management bandwagon and have renamed their product set to somehow fit into the ITIL terminology. They might be a different colour of dog, a different breed of dog, but they all still remain dogs. The commercial network management products are nothing more than Lovelace’s “talisman” around his neck, squeezing and sucking the existence out of him. Hopefully, reading this blog is that pure chance for you to escape as well. So front and centre, the answer lies in a little know open source tool named NEDI (http://www.nedi.ch/). NEDI, which stands for Network Discovery, has finally had its 1.0 (RC4)release on 24th October, 2007. It has been slow progress over the years through all the 0.x releases. But it has been worth it as it is the BEST tool. The concept is simple. It starts around providing a means to manage the configurations of your networks and supplies the tools to automate the discovery. The output forms the basis of any network documentation and by default is a source of doing root cause analysis. When outages occur the tool is crucial in working out what has changed. And when it comes to budgeting, capacity management and all those service delivery aspects, it again steps up to the plate. As a proactive tool it is highly recommended. And finally, you can use it with UBuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) The best open source operating system by far, but that is for another blog.