Just a heads up that I’m back coding and the next few patches are expected within the week.

The current focus is on
– cable management
– update notification
– view/positioning of items within the back of a rack

This functionality will be intermittent within the next few nightly builds. Once completed a release note will be available here.
If you have any feedback from these adjustments please head to the forums or email me (daniel at racksmith dot net)

On a side note theres also a new logo / design adjustment coming once I’ve got the development back on track

Dan

Just a quick note that the nightly builds are now online and include some big improvements.
We’ve just added paging to the search page and are looking to finish off the cabling component in the next week or so.

As with all code straight from the dev environment its not yet suggested that you use this in prod however its being stabilized and improved daily.

We’ve removed the current files from sourceforge. It is not a move we were expecting to make however, the release is so far behind we didn’t want to present that version of the software as a release candidate.

We are starting preparations for the installer and finishing off the last few patches.
More soon

Just a quick note that we now have a publicly accessible test environment.
http://dev.racksmith.net
This contains our most up to date code and has many major changes which will be included in the next release.

As this site is automatically generated from our source control its database will get reset after each update and include only basic buildings and devices. We’d love to hear any feedback on our forums.

Slightly behind schedule but I’ve started testing the next release & wrapping up the last sections.
I’m hoping to package up a download this weekend as long as the upgrade script is complete.

There are some major changes which will be reflected in the documentation on http://help.racksmith.net in the week after release.

We’re currently wrapping up the next release, its includes some fairly major changes considering our last version came out in september.

Main items of interest:
• Devices & Templates have been overhauled, there is now much greater control on the data you can collect
• Switches, Patch Panels & Devices now have fully customisable port configurations. We no longer preset these values.
• Cabinets which can be placed outdoors, these are treated as if they contain a normal rack and you can place rackmountable items within them.
• Improved backend for future expansion – The new system opens up many new options & we’re already planning the featureset of the next few releases.

We hope to have this release out in the next week, the majority of code is completed however we still need to make an upgrade script for existing users.
The demo will be upgraded in the next few days and then the version released once the upgrade script is completed.

Over the past few weeks we’ve received a lot of feedback about how users wish to customise different devices within RackSmith.
In the existing system this has been quite difficult as devices have strict predefined attributes however this is about to change.

The idea is that devices will now be built by selecting a combination of traits, allowing you to more closely model any real world scenario. This is an extremely important step forward for us as it allows much more future expansion and standardises a lot of our code.

Below you can see some of the possible options available, each of these traits contains values within them allowing finer configuration (eg. rack mountable contains a RU height value).
Remember this form is only used once per model of device & simplifies all future work.

You can find this new feature on the development version on the SVN, it is almost completed and about to undergo testing before the next release.

Just a quick note that the online demo has been reset to simplify things for new users.
This will occur fortnightly to avoid the build up of random racks and devices.

On another note we’ll be back developing this week as uni winds down for the year. Only 2 exams left then graduation