Managing physical portion of a network

[iamkion132]

I work at a place as an IT intern where IT is treated as an afterthought at best most of the time so there is a lot of things that I think can be improved in regards to a number of different IT areas. For a lot of that time I was more concerned with keeping things running with what I could and not much beyond that but within the past year I've been wanting to do more and especially now with graduation being so close.

One of the big things that I want to work on is getting a handle on the physical portion of the network. I've been here almost two years and I don't have a clear picture of how things are wired up here. When people move offices etc the basically have unplugged the computer from their old office and plopped it in the new one along with the phones so there are a lot of exposed ports laying around the business.

I'm looking for insight as to how people manage their networks related to the physical portion. Do you have a wire map showing where everything goes, dedicated software to keep track of things etc.

 

[Berg0]

used to keep track of everything in spreadsheets. not the best method by any means but I used share point for version control.

Basically, each keystone on a wallplate was labelled with a value that describes the patch panel port it terminates in, so 1-2 would be patch panel 1 port 2. From there the we would patch active drops to cisco switches and place that numerical value in the description field. so, when you do, for instance, a "sh run int gi 0/2" you would see "description 1-2" and know that port gi 0/2 on that switch corresponds to that wall plate. we also use mac address security mac address sticky, so it was pretty easy to figure out what computer was connected where. Fortunately for us we never had more than 80 workstations per floor, so we could get away with 2 48 port switches, and it was pretty easy to find anything we needed.

 

[J-Will]

another way to do the labeling is to label the drops at the patch panel by room number. If the rooms have just a few drops. So office 152 might have 4 drops, you'd have 152-1 152-2 and so on.

The hard part is knowing when to deactivate ports. Good luck with a plan for that. Users dont realize that having all ports active all the time is not a good idea.

 

[xphil3]

1. Spreadsheets are good
2. Visio is better
3. again, labeling is a MUST
4. SNMP makes things easier to map and monitor, yes.. applies to physical mapping