Shapes for 1U rack-mount servers

[Martin Gleadow <jez arafel org uk>]

I have recently started using Dia to document network architectures and 
have found it highly useful.  However, when it came to documenting a 
rack full of 1U servers I couldn't find any shapes that really fitted my 
needs so decided to create some.  I am reasonably happy with the way 
they have turned out (and I learned a fair bit about the Dia shape 
format in the process).

You can download them from http://jez.choralone.org/dia.html where you 
can also preview them in icon form.

Feedback and comments welcome.

I have the following notes and observations on them:

* They are 2D only since this was easier for me to create and frankly 
there is little point in seeing the rest of a rack-mount server

* I have created different designs based on the different servers I 
needed to document - I figured that if I needed to document the type of 
server it was better to do so diagrammatically rather than add a text 
label to each one

* There is no internationalization in any of the files

* Icons are 80 pixels wide as they were too small to see at 40px

I drew the shapes in Dia and exported them as .shape files, using Gimp 
to tidy up .png's where necessary.  The only problem I encountered here 
was the addition of heavy black lines to the shape file - I manually 
edited these and removed 'path' elements which appeared to be causing 
the problems.

I initially used 160px icons with the idea that there would be one icon 
per line in the menu - however I couldn't get this to work.  Is there 
something which needs to be done to the .sheet file to tidy the menu?

As an aside, is there an easy way to add a colour fill to the Sunfire 
v120 shape created by the intersection of the bezier lines with the edge 
of the rectangle?  If this is unclear I can provide a rendering of what 
I would like to do.

A nice feature may be to improve the shape-creation mechanisms within 
Dia to make it really easy to add shapes created from within the program.

Finally, thank you to all who have worked to make this tool, it is fast 
becoming one of the key items of software in my job.

Martin

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Martin Gleadow
jez arafel org uk