A little while ago, I sat down with ZipTie‘s Michael Nels and Ryan Kruse for a detailed demo of ZipTie, the open source network inventory and configuration management tool. That is, ZipTie scans all the devices on your network, figures out what they are, what’s running on them, and then gives you the ability to backup and change the network-oriented configuration for each device (it doesn’t dip into the application layer, for example, configuring Exchange).
As with most open source IT Management tools, things get interesting with the plugin, or extension layer where 3rd parties and individuals can come in add new features.
The demo is divided into two parts. Be sure to click the full-screen version if you’d like to see a larger version.
Overview, Discovery, Inventory
Michael gives us an overview of ZipTie, including it’s origin and how it ties into AlterPoint‘s commercial product, NetworkAuthority. Ryan then jumps in to show us the initial discovery, admin setup, and poking around in the resulting inventory:
Jobs, Topology, Extending
Ryan continues by showing us how to setup scheduled jobs (like nightly configuration backups), the table based topology, and the Michael and Ryan go over browsing and using extensions and how to get ZipTie:
Disclosure: AlterPoint is a client and sponsored this screencast.
[…] While the big-time news was light this week, Ryan and I found plenty to talk about. We spend a fair amount of time talking about ZoHo mail and the ZoHo marketplace, the curious case of the missing RIA email client, Pandora on the Chumby, Google ads in Flash games, conferences (like PDC), and then close out by pointing out two RIA-based (or at least using) enterprise applications I recently did screencasts for, myCMDB and ZipTie. […]