[HECnet] HECnet mapping project

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2012-12-25 12:22, sampsa at mac.com wrote:
[Brian, please don't kill me for announcing this too early :P ]

Guys,

We're working on a network walker that will eventually produce a graph of HECnet.

We're basically doing a NCP SHOW KNOW CIRC, grabbing each area routing node and then recursively walking those.

Well it's a bit more complex than that, but that's the general idea :)

Once this is done, we do a NCP SHOW ADJ NODES to get the nodes in the area of each area router.

This is what we've come up with so far (the ADJ NODES code is under work, so if your node is missing, don't worry - mainly checking all the area routers are there):

http://sampsa.com/routers.svg

Very cool. However, if someone were to do something really useful, it would be to instead figure out the actual connectivity.
It's hard to explain exactly what I mean, but in short, that graph have quite a lot of lines for the Update bridge, for example. But in reality, that is all one ethernet segment. Such a thing would be nice to have illustrated as one (thick) line with all nodes attached to that.
The same goes for a local ethernet segment somewhere as well. Having everything illustrated as point-to-point connections makes for lots of lines, and sometimes some confusion.

Another kind of graph that would be cool (but even harder) would be to have a map of the world, with the nodes placed out, and connections. That kind of map would work to have everything illustrated as point-to-point connections. But figuring out the physical locations is another story. (I guess the only way would be if people could put that kind of information in some file, in a format that would be machine parseable.)

Anyone feeling like tackling this? :-)

	Johnny