We're currently in the process of documenting our existing mess of legacy network cabling in order to rip it all out over Christmas. The documentation is coming along well in the form of tables, but even a subset was impossible to visualize on a whiteboard - and we will continue to add various bigger and smaller boxes that cables plug into over the next few weeks.
That task would be made far easier if we could just write a definition of our network in the style of "port 7 on device A plugs into port 38 of device B" and have the layout figured out automatically. Graphviz looks like it'd be something that could do this, but my first attempts don't make me hopeful - a test diagram comes out looking like this:
https://i.imgur.com/DJdUmPl.png
The edges are crossing through the switches even with only four devices and four wires. And dot-file / graph examples and discussion on StackExchange make it look like we'd run into far greater issues if more are added. It also seems like neato and fdp are even less suited engines.
Has someone here used Graphviz in this capacity, or does some specialized tool that's able to generate a diagram based on this kind of input exist? If using Graphviz, I'd write some sort of wrapper script to generate the dot-file due to how much repetitive text there is, so manually tuning things wouldn't be an option.
I'm primarily trying to understand if I'm even looking at the right tool, hence no specifics.
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