Monash University has one of the largest computer networks in the southern hemisphere. It is spread across 7 campuses including one campus in South Africa and one campus in Malaysia. The campus networks are connected together with a combination of 34Mbit and 155Mbit microwave links, and 155Mbit fibre links. Presently over 50 Gigabytes of data is transferred between the Monash internal network and the Internet each day.

The Monash network is an ATM network consisting of a maze of hubs and switches. With such a complex network, problems can arise that become very hard to identify. Our software runs on a dedicated server within Monash that contains a dynamically updated database of all hosts on the network, along with switch and hub settings. Network staff can then, via a web interface, query the database and identify problems with configurations.

Due to the number of hosts and the amount of switch and hub configuration data contained in the application database, complex query and parallel processes had to be programmed to find information in a reasonable time frame. Access to the analysis web pages is restricted to a small group of network support staff and the authentication is done using the Monash central LDAP directory. Monash and Adroit Internet Solutions have made the source code for the application available under the GPL open source license.