The software engineering process lends itself well to large, well-managed, multi-disciplinary teams producing well-defined products in response to detailed requirements analysis. As much fun as that sounds, sometimes what you really need is a short and simple answer to a short and simple question, right now.
The business of daily operations at almost every service provider depends on the existence of a herd of small, single-use scripts designed to emulate in a few seconds work that a human operator might take a couple of hours to do. The focus of these tools is usefulness in the hands of a network operator rather than engineering purity or elegance in design.
We have gathered pointers to tools that other people have found useful at some time or another, together with Other Related Stuff. Contributions are most welcome.
Related Information
- Managing IP Networks with Free Software, a tutorial delivered by ISC at NANOG 26 (local copy)
- Abstract for a Toolmakers' BOF, which was held at NANOG 26
Tools
- filter_audit_1.01: find and/or notify of uinused or undefined router filters, triggered when changes in the report are detected. Works with rancid.
- mktop: produces a simple router topology from a concatenated stream of router configs
- peer_prefixes: record the number of prefixes that BGP peers send you
- top2dot: make a .dot file (editable by graphviz) from mktop output
- top2hosts: make a hosts file from mktop output
- The toolmakers repository (an FTP index listing)
