Presentation

NORDUnet Network Inventory project

NORDUnet Network inventory project is divided in to three parts.

Producers that produce data files in the NERDS format.
Consumers that uses the collected data. NOCLook is one of those consumers.
Repository for version control. We use git.

NERDS project

NERDS stand for Network Enterprise Resource Discovery System. A collaborative effort between initially NORDUnet and Stockholm University to collect reusable data about "stuff" on our networks. The collected data is saved in a JSON format by the producers. The thought is that you then can create consumers for data that was collected by someone else or use a producer that you have not written yourself.

https://github.com/fredrikt/nerds

nerdsPhilosophy

NERDS JSON structure

{   
   "host": {
      "name": "hostname-or-other-unique-identifier",
      "version": 1,
      "name-of-producer": { ... any private data ... }
   }
}

JSON data from the Alcatel ISIS producer

{
    "host": {
        "alcatel_isis": {
            "data": {
                "ip_address": "", 
                "link": "", 
                "name": "NU-TUG-LM-02", 
                "osi_address": "4700230000000100010001000100206066D6F81D", 
                "ots": "NA", 
                "type": "ne1626LM"
            }, 
            "name": "NU-TUG-LM-02", 
            "neighbours": [
                {
                    "metric": "12", 
                    "name": "NU-ORE-TSS-01"
                }
            ]
        }, 
        "name": "NU-TUG-LM-02", 
        "version": 1
    }
}

NOCLook

NOCLook is one of the possible consumer for the collected NERDS data. It is a web app built with Django and the Neo4j graph database.

All nodes have a SQL node handle to make it easy to use regular Django reusable apps like Django Comments or Taggit.
The nodes also have a node type that is stored in the SQL database.

NodeHandle model properties

# Handle <-> Node data
    handle_id = models.AutoField(primary_key=True)
    # Data shared with the node
    node_name = models.CharField(max_length=200)
    node_type = models.ForeignKey(NodeType)
    node_meta_type = models.CharField(max_length=255,
        choices=NODE_META_TYPE_CHOICES)
    # Meta information
    creator = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='creator')
    created = models.DateTimeField(auto_now_add=True)
    modifier = models.ForeignKey(User, related_name='modifier')
    modified = models.DateTimeField(auto_now=True)
    .
    .
    methods

http://git.nordu.net/?p=norduni.git

https://portal.nordu.net/display/NI/