valke@wundt.psy.vu.nl (Peter Valkenburg) (11/13/89)
Hello there, the second author (Dick Kappelhof) of this article is a network-administrator at the Bankgiro Centrale (BGC), a financial & administrative service center for dutch banks, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. This company has a large amount of multi-vendor (IBM, Unisys, Tandem, etc) network hard- & software for financial traffic all over the Netherlands. Recently, a project was set up to centrally administrate this hard- and software. Before reinventing the wheel however, it seemed appropriate to find out if there have been similar efforts to develop such a system, which is why this article was posted. Among the goals of the system are the following: - providing documentation on hardware, network protocols and the like for network management - an overview of the type, physical locations and connectivity of hardware (e.g. speed/quality of lines and their geography) - providing an inventory of various communication protocols and an overview of the hardware on which they run - presenting the above in an easy to understand way for non- technical people (i.e. in the form of pictures) The questions are: 1. Does anyone know of software for managing this kind of data (e.g. in database applications). The software is probably to run on IBM OS's (OS/2, AS400, System 36, etc). 2. Is there any existing literature on the subject (perhaps in software engineering)? 3. Do you know of people that have experience in developing a system that systematically inventorizes and documents computersystems and networks? (Please mail on how to contact them) Thanks in advance for any answers to the above questions, ------------------------------- |Peter Valkenburg | |Dick Kappelhof | |(mail address: valke@psy.vu.nl)| ------------------------------- P.s.: if you know of newsgroups that are more appropriate for this article than the ones listed in the header, please mail them.