ASCIIFlow Infinity

First, I don't like the idea of being tied to a webservice for my map drawing tools. I would really like the source code so I can self-host. I looked around the new updated asciiflow website and didn't see any links to source so correct me if I'm wrong.

Second, and most importantly, as a senior sysadmin over the years I have seen hundreds of network maps, the vast majority of them being in visio due to it having market dominance, and there is a problem that neither visio or it's competitors has addressed, and that's automated network mapping with versioning so you can diff and walk back in time. It's the thing even the best automappers still don't do right because they tend to get the topology wrong (such as one of my favorite automappers like librenms's).

This is why one of the utilities I have been working on is a bash-script cobbling together nwdiag (http://blockdiag.com/en/nwdiag/index.html), a subset of the blockdiag, with nmap and (h/f)ping scanners as the generating input and cronified daily versionable text output with checksums, with bonus things like new kea-dhcp lease triggering rescan via the kea restful api.

I think the future of network maps needs to be both automated and text based to enable admins and executives the ability to fully visualize the network at any given state in time, with the ability to walk the cat back with confidence in the accuracy of the map you are looking at(I would like to integrate gpg as well).

It's not quite ready for release, (sitting in my github projects folder waiting for push), but I lazily named it anmap for automated-network-mapper.

So right now how I use it personally is I have an emacs-org mode file that is cronified to output daily latex pdf reports that calls the bash script and generates the output map which is then listed inside the rest of the org-mode systems report which does other stuff like give me go-no-go on system usage via stuff like lynis, rkhunter, ckrootkit, and ossec.

tldr - Basicallly the network map industry is extremely ripe for competition and all these web-based network mapping tools are still not addressing a core needs usecase for sysadmins.