Hello All,
My name is Chris Henesy and I am a senior CS major at the Georgia
Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. I am writing to offer an
idea that some friends and I have been discussing for awhile and to see if
there as any interest in our pursuing it before we begin.
My friends and I will soon be required to begin our senior
design/development project. We are all Linux users and have a desire to do
an open source/Linux project to fulfill this requirement. One idea that we
had was a graphical network configuration program. The idea works like
this: You have a blank drawing page onto which you can drag and drop icons
depicting different network equipment (Cisco Routers, Bay Networks Hubs,
etc.) You can then connect these icons with arrows representing different
physical wiring, or network routes. [ So far this kinda sounds like what
you can do with, Dia Huh? :) ] The arrows have properties that you can
assign such as protocol type, direction, address range, etc. But here is
the show stopper... When your diagram is finished, you can click a button
that will cause a file to be written for each of the devices in the diagram.
These files contain the configuration commands necessary to configure each
piece of equipment as it appears in the diagram. The program will know the
proper command syntax for each piece of equipment so that these config files
can be directly loaded into the routers.
If we were to try to start from scratch to write this program, we
would have to worry about a lot of messy details such as creating the
drawing area and such and would duplicate a lot of work already done on Dia.
Since Dia is already an open source program capable of some limited network
drawings, we figured our best bet would be to extend the network drawing
diagram type in Dia.
So what do you think? Does this sound like a good idea? IS Dia the
right starting point for this project? Does any of what we proposes sound
difficult in Dia?
Thanks!
Chris Henesy
