NetHorus Blog

The bridge support continues, albeit slowly.  It’s rather complicated to work out, but I hope the results will be quite cool.

To keep things moving, I’ve started to implement RFC2495 support for DS1/E1 lines.  To check this out, update to the latest SVN HEAD, go to the Interfaces tab on a device, and click an E1 interface.

This weekend, I’m hoping to work on further testing and hopefully complete most of the bridge support, getting as far as a bridge topology diagram.  Automatic Spanning Tree diagrams, anyone…?

It appears that removing ActiveScaffold is a longer task than I thought.

Right now, and it’s not in SVN HEAD yet, there’s a more-or-less working (but it needs prettying up) framework for administering devices.  I hope to check this in over the weekend, or perhaps on Monday, and then get back to work with the BRIDGE-MIB.

Progress of late has become sluggish.  The Rails 2.1/ActiveScaffold 1.1.1 problems have resulted in fighting fires and trying to find magic version combinations that work.

On the train home this evening, I had a revelation.  “Why am I using ActiveScaffold?  I don’t need the flashy AJAX functionality”.

So, ActiveScaffold is disappearing from NetHorus.  This isn’t an “ActiveScaffold is bad”, it’s a “It doesn’t do what I need it to do”. I’d rather invest time in writing my own straightfoward front-end, than spend the same amount of time tailoring ActiveScaffold.

So what about the bridges?  I’m very pleased to report that despite the BRIDGE-MIB being very scary indeed, things aren’t too bad.  I won’t be checking in code to Subversion until such time as the bridge management functionality can show something good, like drawing a basic STP topology.

Finally – it seems nobody out there reads this blog.  If you do, can you get in touch?