We have a location that’s a few blocks down from the main office here, and we were reviewing the circuit size to make sure it was sized properly.  Since not one person knows what’s going on and the trending graphs gave us conflicting details, one of our network dudes took me down to the site to do a physical survey to see what’s going on.  Well, besides the fact that no one was there, we discovered a hodgepodge of routers and switches that were cross-connected to one another on multiple floors of the building (I really wish I could post pics to emote the effect).  It’s kind of hard to figure out what’s going on when you can’t see both ends of the cable, so we had to abandon all hope.

In my billion years in the industry, when I’ve asked for network diagrams, I’ve inevitably received a physical diagram – a diagram that shows where stuff is plugged in. This is fine and dandy and has lots of information, but that’s not really enough these days. In the times of Arthur, when every piece of network gear did a single thing, you only needed to know where things were plugged in. In the modern era, devices do more – a switch can route and house wireless, an ASA can terminate VPNs and be a switch – so you need more than just where the cables run.