When Boredom Strikes

Today I learned quite a few things from my dad. It turns out that we needed to make a network map of some sort which included a database of all the network devices in the company.

We initially deduced that we would have to go with html to make regions of our network map clickable—which would in turn then show another page containing all the information about that device: who's connected to which port, the number of ports as well as the IP addresses and the MAC addresses.

It turns out that there's this thing called FileMaker, and it does WYSIWYG what most of us would type on a terminal for several hours just to code tables and links and scripts on a regular DBMS—sort of like visually object-oriented DBMS. The first thing that ran through my head as he explained the basics of the program to us was "Oh man, the things I can do with this!"

Like all the good things in life, there is a little caveat—a $150 price tag. Good thing that the company legally owns the software we're using; I don't even want to know what we can ILLEGALLY do with this software.

Despite all that it turns out that IF we are able to pull this off, we could very well be on our way to have a portable online implementation of network documentation that can be so easy to use so as long as the user knows the details of the topology of the network.

Hopefully we'll finish soon and then I'll be able to upload a little something-something that doesn't actually contain sensitive information about the company my dad works for.

So, hope to see you soon.