RackMan project

About

RackMan is a project that is intended to help SysAdmins and data center engineers track the location of devices within racks, and plan for future changes. The project allows users to create devices (including name, manufacturer, model, etc.) and specify each device's height in Us and depth (half-rack or full-rack). A hierarchy of racks can be created (location, room, rack) and the height (in Us) and depth (full or half) of each rack can be specified. Devices can then be assigned to each rack, and a simple table is used to give a graphical view of the layout of the rack.

Other features:

Devices can be set to a number of statuses from hyopthetical through production to decommissioned, and are displayed color-coded in the rack view.
All changes are temporary until explicitly committed. Devices can be moved around within a rack, and added to or removed from a rack, to see the results - and then the changes can either be committed or rolled back.
Unused devices are displayed in a "holding area" (virtual stock room) until assigned to a rack or deleted.
Supports hierarchial categories of devices (i.e. Server/Web Server/Linux or Network/Router/CiscoIOS).
Simple database schema for devices - as long as a unique identifier (hostname?) exists, devices can easily be imported from an external source via script.

Questions it helps (me) to answer quickly:

How many Us do we have free in rack C6?
Can we add a 5U storage array in rack A3?
Do we have any decommissioned machines in the rack that can be pulled?
Where is the foo server?
Hosts foo and bar are overheating. Could it be related?
How many spare DL360's do we have?
I need to build a machine. Is there any acceptable and unused hardware already in the rack?
Why the #&$36;*@ do I need a 42U rack in my basement at home?

Status

RackMan is currently in an alpha state. It works enough for me to use it on a regular basis, but isn't really release quality. It does what it does correctly, but is very feature-limited, ugly, and rough around the edges. There are also a nubmer of options that are hard-coded, quite a bit of cruft and some stuff that just doesn't really make sense.

That being said, I'll be willing to implement anything that's asked for relatively quickly. Drop me an email if you're interested in the project, and I'll get back to the coding.

Demo

I don't currently have a functional demo online. You can take a look at a sample rack view here.

Code

This is still quite messy, and probably not ready for installation. I'm working on it - if you want to give it a spin, drop me an email and I'll get you a current tarball and installation instructions. It's not too complicated - grab the code somewhere that's accessible by a web server, create a database, load it with the schema.sql file, and edit config/config.php.

Code is available via SVN at: http://svn.jasonantman.com/rackman/config/ or can be browsed online via ViewVC at: http://viewvc.jasonantman.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/rackman/.