Hello!
I have just started trying NAV, and is running it on a small part of our network at the moment, and have some questions:
It finds our vlans and matches them with the correct prefixes but since we don't follow the convention for naming router interfaces the net ident and description fields is either empty (most common) or a bit confusing. Is there a way to edit them manually (directly in the database?)? Any other suggestions?
If I want to enter cabling, in which "direction" is it supposed to be, should I enter the wiring closet as "Room" and the office as "Target" or the other way around?
/Per Andersson Chalmers IT-department
On Wed, 24 Jun 2015 16:58:50 +0200 Per Andersson pa@chalmers.se wrote:
Hello!
Hi there!
It finds our vlans and matches them with the correct prefixes but since we don't follow the convention for naming router interfaces the net ident and description fields is either empty (most common) or a bit confusing. Is there a way to edit them manually (directly in the database?)?
If there was a way (besides doing SQL magic), they would automatically be overwritten the next time the interface descriptions were collected by ipdevpoll.
Any other suggestions?
Pick one of these two:
1. Change your conventions.
2. If your existing convention already contains some of the information NAV wants to store about a VLAN, you could document that convention, file a bug report at [1], and we could write a new convention parser for it. We already have two such parsers [2].
NAV has been ubiquitous in Norway for so many years now that most campuses have adopted the conventions already supported by NAV. NOCs with no conventions, or with very small networks seem to do the same.
However, I'm sure any organization with a sufficiently large and organized network will already have their own established conventions, which we could also support.
If I want to enter cabling, in which "direction" is it supposed to be, should I enter the wiring closet as "Room" and the office as "Target" or the other way around?
Yes, wiring closets are the same as rooms in NAV (IIRC, there should be a dropdown to select one of the rooms that are already registered in NAV - unless you are bulk importing, of course). Target is a free text field, since we don't aim to keep a structured database of your office plan ;-)
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/nav/+filebug [2] https://bitbucket.org/mbrekkevold/nav-mirror/src/bf5eb7b65b591e24920ab5d00ee...
Morten Brekkevold skrev den 2015-06-25 08:51:
On Wed, 24 Jun 2015 16:58:50 +0200 Per Andersson pa@chalmers.se wrote:
Hello!
Hi there!
It finds our vlans and matches them with the correct prefixes but since we don't follow the convention for naming router interfaces the net ident and description fields is either empty (most common) or a bit confusing. Is there a way to edit them manually (directly in the database?)?
If there was a way (besides doing SQL magic), they would automatically be overwritten the next time the interface descriptions were collected by ipdevpoll.
Any other suggestions?
Pick one of these two:
Change your conventions.
If your existing convention already contains some of the information NAV wants to store about a VLAN, you could document that convention, file a bug report at [1], and we could write a new convention parser for it. We already have two such parsers [2].
NAV has been ubiquitous in Norway for so many years now that most campuses have adopted the conventions already supported by NAV. NOCs with no conventions, or with very small networks seem to do the same.
However, I'm sure any organization with a sufficiently large and organized network will already have their own established conventions, which we could also support.
OK, we don't have any convention for this today, we only use it as a free format description.
If I want to enter cabling, in which "direction" is it supposed to be, should I enter the wiring closet as "Room" and the office as "Target" or the other way around?
Yes, wiring closets are the same as rooms in NAV (IIRC, there should be a dropdown to select one of the rooms that are already registered in NAV
- unless you are bulk importing, of course). Target is a free text
field, since we don't aim to keep a structured database of your office plan ;-)
This was my first guess.
Thanks for the answers!
/Per Andersson
On Thu, 25 Jun 2015 16:57:07 +0200 Per Andersson pa@chalmers.se wrote:
However, I'm sure any organization with a sufficiently large and organized network will already have their own established conventions, which we could also support.
OK, we don't have any convention for this today, we only use it as a free format description.
Then I would humbly recommend that you adopt a parseable convention :-)
Thanks for the answers!
No problem - good luck with your testing!
-
Morten Brekkevold -
Per Andersson