atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums General General Telephone & Systems Information visual inventory of switch room and pbx

I just downloaded (for free)The Dude. After fooling around with it for about an hour---I printed out a map of our small network here (11 devices). It was rather painless---and 95% of the mapping was done automatically. Not bad.

Wow! I didn't expect so much intrest in this thread.

I really appreciate all the responses guys.

So far it looks like Bentley is the best match.

I use Smartdraw, and I love it.
https://www.smartdraw.com

I call it a "poor man's Visio", but it's very easy to use and get started quickly. They have free 30 day downloads.

Jim

Had to deinstall The Dude from our system. Seems it would constantly ping all of the terminals even when it wasn't on. It saturated the network with traffic, and made our IP system go nuts.

We could re-do the system parameters, but we decided just to undo The Dude.

We liked the diagrams and it was fun to fool around with, but the hassle with the phones was too much. Had to reset some of the phones 3 or 4 times a day. No good.

Sorry to hear that. I suppose I should have explained in my post re:Dude. All monitoring programs increase traffic, obviously, as they have to monitor. The Dude monitors aggressively out the box, as it is geared to non-professionals.
Problems increase when the Dude is installed as a server in more than 1 PC on the network. Unfortunately, it installs as a server that runs 24/7 silently by default, so running on 2 PCs as a server=twice the traffic increase. You can change the settings to have the Dude server run on 1 machine only, also to run as a Service. Version 3 includes a web server, so you don't have to install the Dude as a client anywhere else, just access the server through a browser.
You can also change the monitoring settings/parameters to exclude devices or do less aggressive monitoring, but you may not want to bother.
I mentioned the software as a quick way to discover and print a network map - anything beyond that would mean getting involved in the intricacies of network management.
Hopefully it wasn't too much grief.

Thanks for the reply. No harm was done---in fact, when things like this happen---we learn. Now we know.

We had a chance to really investigate using the event logs of the phone system and found out what a lot of that stuff means---plus we got a chance to use Wireshark and use that software for some dignostics. It's all a learning experience.