In order to manage a network, especially of this size and complexity, you must have both documentation and an usable and accurate Inventory. The best choice was to build the inventory in an RDBMS. I selected mysql (then played with mariadb, but seem to stick with mysql). I run and maintaine the RDBMS on my laptop for the time being and dump formatted reports to be included on the internal website. I do plan to setup an RDBMS server to house the production version.

Being in an RDBMS the data will be quickly assisable and managable. As things go, this is a small and rather simple database (just one table) what others would implement in a spreadsheet, but I have bigger plans for the data.

I keep backups of different iteration of the db both on my laptop and the subsiquent backup systems I personally use. On our Internet webserver I also keep raw backups along with viewable reports.

The schema is, in this case, a description of the different fields and their characteristics.

Below is the Inventory.Inventory table schema as of 6/18/22 6:07 PM

MariaDB [inventory]> describe inventory;
+-------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| Field       | Type          | Null | Key | Default | Extra          |
+-------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
| id          | int(11)       | NO   | PRI | NULL    | auto_increment |
| ip          | varchar(16)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| mac         | varchar(18)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| wifiip      | varchar(16)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| wifimac     | varchar(18)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| name        | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| type        | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| function    | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| location    | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| ports       | varchar(4096) | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| switch      | varchar(64)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| switchport  | varchar(64)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| sn          | varchar(124)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| os          | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| firmware    | varchar(96)   | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| dante       | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| ssid        | varchar(256)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| channel     | varchar(8)    | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| disposition | varchar(512)  | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| notes       | varchar(4096) | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
| lastseen    | date          | YES  |     | NULL    |                |
+-------------+---------------+------+-----+---------+----------------+
21 rows in set (0.002 sec)

In the table above note that;

• Field name is the name of each column
• Type is the datatype.
  int is integer
  varchar(x) is variable character length with a max of x
  key indicates if and what type of key that column contains. PRI is PRImary Key
  default defines what the default value is for each field if there is no actual value given
  extra is additional information. In this case, id is defined as auto-increment. This means that every time a new row is inserted, the id field/column will increment by 1 so that the id column can both act as a record ID, and so that each row is guaranteed to be unique and no two rows will be identical