I am working on a scripting interface for dia which could be useful for
this sort of thing. I don't know when it will get to a stage when it is
useful for your project though. It would probably be necessary to add a
few new object types for your diagrams.
Alternatively, you could try parsing the dia diagram format and create
your config files from that. If time is a constraint, this may be a good
path to choose.
Of course, you may decide to not use dia at all. Using the GNOME canvas
would make this sort of program fairly easy to write.
James.
--
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
WWW: http://www.daa.com.au/~james/
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, Henesy, Chris A. wrote:
> 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
>
