The ECN No Name Newsletter is no longer being published. This is an archived issue.

New ECN Map

Within the two years since the last map production, many changes have taken place. Numerous machines have been added, a new network backbone installed, and a few older machines removed.

At first I thought, what have I gotten myself into and how am I ever going to accurately represent all the computers on the network.

I began with the /etc/hosts network file that lists all machines connected to Purdue's Computer Network. When I printed all of ECN's machines from the file using the smallest margins possible in WordPerfect, it totaled 75 pages.

Once I had all of the information summarized for a site, I visited site specialists to learn which subnets and machines are maintained by their respective school. After meeting with each site specialist, I began the map update process.

By Spring break I had all of the sites finished except for ECE, the largest site. ECE has about 400f the machines in ECN and takes up a little under half of the 1996 map. I had hoped to be half finished with the map by spring break, yet I still had a long way to go.

ECE has 45 machines that connect to 2 or more of the 40 subnets in the ECE site. I had to figure out a way to make the ECE site NOT look like a pile of spaghetti. I spent the rest of the semester getting ECE organized, laid out, and drawn on the map.

Now that I had all of the information for each site in the AutoCAD drawing, I still had to make them all fit onto a three foot by four foot sheet of paper. To accomplish this task, a substantial amount of compacting and rearranging had to be done to each site.

Once everything fit within the boarders of the map, it was ready to print. At this time the new ECN map can be seen in the hallway of MSEE across from room 104. The map is online at http://www.ecn.purdue.edu/ECN/Network_Maps/ .

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