Nodemap—The Network Diagrammer

A fter spending years working with personal computer software to increase the productivity of network operations, I have grown particularly fond of products that are both valuable and fun to use. Nodemap from HavenTree Software is definitely one such product. Developed by a team of five persons, Nodemap can be considered as a productivity tool for people with a periodic requirement to produce different types of network diagrams, ranging in scope from a small LAN to groups of LANs interconnected via a complex wide area network. This wellthought-out program contains a large number of features which make its use practical for diagramming network activities. For example, consider the use of a variety of competitive products that provide you with the ability to diagram network configurations. Those products typically let you place symbols on a map of Europe or North America and by interconnecting those symbols obtain a schematic diagram of your network. Unfortunately, when you print your schematic, chances are high that your entire network diagram is squeezed onto one page. Recognizing this problem, which can degrade the legibility of a network schematic, Nodemap diagrams are drawn on a ’logical page’ basis. The logical page can grow in size to represent multiple physical pages, and when this occurs the program will automatically break up a diagram for printing onto the number of physical pages required to represent the logical page. Thereafter, you can tape the pages together to obtain a single large page which can represent a large network diagram you can read without requiring the use of a magnifying glass. Figure 1 illustrates the Nodemap main menu screen after a small diagram has been created. The upper-left window is known as the TextIMessage window. In this example it is used to define the use of your function keys as well as to provide information concerning the cursor position in the Diagram window, which is the large window that occupies the right portion of your screen. The term ’Snaps ON’ in the Text/Message window references the enabling of the program’s snap grid, a feature which facilitates moving the cursor to the next grid location without having to explicitly position it by hand to that location. Under the Text/Message window is the Current Shape window. As you move your cursor in the diagram window the Current Shape window shows the content of the current shape area of the diagram. Thus, the ’compressed’ diagram that may be barely legible in the Diagram window becomes fully understandable when displayed in the Current Shape window. For users like the author that have a VGA screen you obtain the display of an extra window known as the Information Display Window. This window, which appears in the lower-left portion of Figure 1, illustrates the pathname of a document loaded into memory, any applicable information about diagram linkages and the number of bytes of currently unused memory. To illustrate the ease with which Nodemap enables the creation of diagrams, let’s examine its use. By pressing the F3 key the status bar at the top of the Text/Message window changes to ‘Shape‘. This allows us to select a shape which will be positioned at the location of the cursor in the Diagram window. To select a