TOOLS FOR MANAGEMENT OF CISCO EQUIPMENT

I can supply a couple of tools for the management of Cisco Systems' network equipment; I developed them since they were necessary for my work of network administrator:

Patrol

Procedure running under Linux (it can be ported to Windows, if needed), mandatory for keeping tracks of the modifications of the configuration of a large group of routers. It alerts the manager of all modifications and allow one to track who made a correction, when, where and possibly why.

Moreover, if you need to substitute some piece of equipment, you'll be sure of having an updated copy of the configuration.

This task is also accomplyshed by the NetSys Baseliner product, but at a cost much bigger!

It works with all Cisco IOS routers and PIX firewalls.

Accounting

This procedure runs under Windows; it periodically dumps ip accounting data from a series of routers, using the telnet protocol, stores them in the database and allows the system administrator to perform the following statistical analysis:

Given a period of time, how much traffic flowed from/to a given subnetwork?
Which hosts generated the most traffic (and exaclty how much of traffic)?
Given a host, how did its traffic partterns evolve?

It is mandatory if one wants to bill her users on a traffic basis, analyse the effectiveness of traffic policies, and discover unexpected things about your network (for example, I never predicted, that in the month before writing these lines, www.ilpiola.it had been the 30th most visited site in Gruppo IH's server farm, a facility hosting more than 700 virtual sites spread across a variety of Windows and unix machines... I would never discovered that by comparing the logs of web servers!)