Currently, it's more of an idea than a project; we have no real automation of the task's it takes to make a Clear-Site page. It combines a few different elements into one tool accessed via your web-browser. There is no limit to what you can do with such a tool. We custom make the pages for our clients to save them time. It's a simple idea, a univeral interface (a web browser is all you need), and centralize the output of some useful network tools...

To Begin:

A background image, such as a bitmap, png or jpeg file is the background such as a floor plan or a map. When we initially came up with the idea we were using a floor plan for a collocation facility. We've also applied the very same idea to "cube farms" at office buildings. When you place your mouse cursor over certain coordinates on this background image a pop-up appears. This pop-up can contain various sorts of information- it's really up to the you/client to determine what appears. The information listed there can also trigger a secondary pop-up with more info or links to more info. That's about it really. The idea is simple enough, but there is a lot of work/code to make a usable and useful Clear-Site page.

Examples

Here are some basic snapshots of the clear-site projects we've implemented for clients (it's much easier to look at an example than to drone on and on)

Floor-plan w/Cacti-graphs EXAMPLE#1

US-Map w/Cacti-graphs & Nagios alerts EXAMPLE#2

Floor-plan w/Cacti-graphs & Ntop & Nagios & WMI-scripts & Snort-alerting EXAMPLE#3

Again it's a simple idea, and a very useful tool to bind other useful tools together in a centralized fashion for FREE. We look for ways to save money and to save our clients money and there is ton's of open source software that allows us to do this. The pages above are static, but are still effective visual aids to show you some of the potential such a page.

The main components we use in our Clear-Site pages are:

Cacti A front end to RRDTool with various automated capabilities.

Ntop Network Top, a flow graphing tool, which can break down the various protocols being used on your network so show you usage- such as SMTP,HTTP,FTP,ICMP traffic.

Snort An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that can alert you when unwanted traffic is on your network. It can even block that traffic on the fly.

Nagios Formerly NetSaint- A host/service monitoring tool. It can tell you when a server goes down using various methods, ICMP, SNMP and even agents running on the servers.

WMI Scripting Windows Management Instrumentation Scripts. These are very useful and highly customizable.

The future release of Clear-Site

This is also called project "Supremium"

Were currently devloping tools to help with the automation of clear-site pages, and their administration. These tools include but are not limited to:

Coordinate mapper, for saving and making points on your background images
Cisco CAM table script and Router ARP scripts for matching MAC's to IP's and MAC's to physical switch ports
Expanded and automated MySQL Database customizations
Predefined Templates for web page frontends
Improved WMI and WMIC scripts for Windows machine monitoring/asset tracking.
Easy to maintain and customize outage reporting and graphing