Dia - the OpenSource diagram tool

After spending hours, trying to create a network diagram in OpenOffice Draw and InkScape, I finally gave up and decided to try something else.

I visited #ubuntu on Freenode IRC for some suggestions to alternative applications for creating diagrams. My requirements were quite simple. All I really wanted was a simple tool that allowed me to define 'sticky' connections along with very basic editing functionality. Within minutes someone in IRC suggested 'Dia'. It was quickly installed through the easy Ubuntu Software Center and up and running within a couple of minutes.

After looking through the different standard objects, I decided that making my own swiches, routers and hosts would probably be easier. It took less than 5 minutes to get comfortable with the simple, yet powerful, interface and all my objects were created.

The connection tool was flexible and fast. The only thing that I didn't find was a way to control connectors on multiple axis, but I am sure there must be a way.

Less than 1 hour after I began this project, I had a very nice layout of my network devices with VLAN color coding.

When I tried to export my diagram to a bitmap file, some issues however did occour. For some strange reason only half the diagram was exported and I found it easier to save as SVG and open it in InkScape for the final export to PNG/PDF and other formats.

Overall this great little tool made my diagramming experience a pleasent one and much easier that trying to achieve the same result in the more established drawing applications.