Network management in simple way!

First, answer yourself for a bunch of questions:

• Does the network You administer consists of few hunderd hosts or more?
• Is it divided into segments, departments or branches?
• Are You registering new hosts, unregister them, block, unblock them, same way, over and over again?
• Are there hosts that should have privilaged or limited network bandwidth?
• Should network users be able to communicate with administrators in straight way allowing other administration units to have access to those conversations?
• Do You loose Your precious time to solve simple problems instead of real administration?

Maybe the situation I described is a problem of Your subordinate? IT line always will suffer from insufficiency of qualified enough engineers. If You got one - isn't he too important to deal with simple administration? Wouldn't be nice to have him back to working on real issues, leaving simple network management to service desk operators?

If the answer to the questions above is mostly YES - this application will improve Your network and bring it to the new age!

How does it work?

It is transparent - solution works in a second layer and does not require router or workstations reconfiguration.

An application consists of following elements:

• Web application
• DHCP server
• Postgres database
• Firewall
• Traffic shaper

About an application author

I'm running two simultanous jobs - one of them is being IT department engineer, second is being a network administrator at Silesian University student campus. I've few Years of experience with network and host based problems and I suffer from constant lack of time to solve simple issues. Thats why I decided to write an application which does it.

Full features list

• Comfort and simplicity oriented interface
• Event notication sent by email or sms (Polish operator ERA GSM was used)

Application parts

Whole application consists of several parts:

• DNS daemon for unregistered hosts service
• Traffic analysis daemon
• Web-based frontend for maintenance and client side registration
• Firewall, traffic shaping and DHCP configuration backend generator
• Current state backup on remote host scripts (encrypted transmission by default using PKI infrastructure non-symmetric keys)
• Document describing complete server configuration to run an application

Requirements

• one host (dedicated server is preferred) with two ethernet adapters, running Linux OS (Debian distribution preferred)
• one managed switch

Software used

• Postgres database
• Apache2 web server
• rrdtool
• gcc compiler
• Lua language
• Python language
• layer7 filter
• ipp2p filter

Production environment

System was working in three different places, one - on development platform, and other two - in production environments, in every case - under different conditions (anther hardware, another configuration). It didn't fail even once. Below I present two deployments - rack mounted and simplified - which is using single physical server. An environment has been deployed as virtual machine and works perfectly good.