For your average person with 1-3 PC’s in their house, you don’t need to map out the computers in your house and show port communications or how your making things work with other locations.

BUT if your larger than that, using several different networks and you’ve to answer to an auditor or a supervisor to explain the networking process without using sock puppets; and on a shoe string budget- 

I got something for you.

It’s called Network Notepad and it’s going to save you time and money.

It’s a free/open source effort to help you make a map, flow chart or diagram of a environment and it requires a very little learning curve.

The program itself come with a few graphics, but custom graphics can be added; it’s very simple. And in comparison to some other high pay packages [Microsoft Visio], it pays for itself.

Here’s some screenshots.

It handles point to point connections, types of connections, custom icons, drag and drop too build the layout and groups of icons can be selected to be moved all at once. The composition canvas is sizeable and when you print the diagram or save it [as a BMP], it scales to fit the page.

Custom Graphics
You can do customer graphics packages real easy. Collect all the ICONs you want to use, place them in the same folder and then give each one of them a unique name. Then you’ve to create a .PLF file. The PLF file is just text; it tells the programs what the ICONs are and what you want to refer to them as.

Example:

Spacing  1800  990

ROUTER1.ico  Router1

ROUTER2.ico  Router2

ROUTER3.ico  Router3

ROUTER4.ico  Router4

ROUTER5.ico  Router5

ROUTER6.ico  Router6

SERVER1.ico  Server1

SERVER2.ico  Server2

SERVER3.ico  Server3

SERVER4.ico  Server4

When finished, save the file in to the OBJECTS folder [as well all the other icons] and restart the program. The new image libraries will be listed. Very simple.

This little app installs locally, but can be copied to the jumpdrive for portability. So if you go place to place and need to have this information with you and be able to change it randomly, this is a good choice.

I use this personally and I find it a very nice tool.

‘I’m not technical, but I play one on the Internet.’

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy.

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