============================================================================

	             		LANdb v0.91
		      Network Management Through SQL
          
		  Distributed under the terms of the GPL
			See COPYING for more info
============================================================================

IMPORTANT: See INSTALL, and optionally ABOUT.  This file is horribly
outdated, and the others contain most of the useful information.

LANdb is a set of Perl scripts that automate the manipulation of an SQL
(usually MySQL) database.  

This package is in its early stages of development, so not nearly all of the
features are yet implemented.  Development should move along rapidly though,
as the code is worked on and added to almost daily.  If you would like to
contribute to LANdb, please email weez@avenir.dhs.org.  I'm always looking
for pointers, and I'm in desparate need of someone to work on documentation.

As of v0.63, LANdb can be considered reasonably stable (in the stable
releases, currently v0.65).  I've worked out a lot of bugs, and I've been 
running the database without incident for some time now.  There is, of course, 
no gaurantee that you won't find something wrong with it the first time you run
it.  If you find a bug, please report it to weez@avenir.dhs.org with a 
complete description of the problem you encountered.  

###
Advantages of LANdb: 
-LANdb is fast, easy, and easily modified to suit your needs.
-LANdb, being written in Perl, is multi-platform.  Although it's only been
 officially used and tested on Linux, it should work well on other Unix-like 
 platforms, and probably the Win32 platform, provided the required packages 
 (below) are installed.
-LANdb is easily ported to any SQL-based RDBMS; use it on Oracle, Microsoft SQL 
 Server, etc.
###
Prerequisites:

LANdb works off of Perl5, MySQL, and DBI.  You'll need to have these
installed in order to use LANdb. MySQL (or an equivalent RDBMS-- use at your
own risk though) can be downloaded from http://www.mysql.com, and the Perl 
stuff can be found at http://www.perl.org/CPAN, although Perl and the CGI 
module generally comes with most *nix distributions.

You'll also need a web server and browser. :)

The documentation is *very* slim right now, and that's something that I hope
to get some contributors on, as all of my time seems to be consumed by the
code.  Everytime I add a feature, I end up having to re-write most of the
others so everything works together happily.  Pretty soon, I'll need the
documentation just to see what the hell I was thinking last week... :)  If 
you like this software, please do think about contributing.  This is my 
first jump into the world of databases, and only my second set of Perl 
scripts, so if you see things that could be done better, please feel free to 
let me know.  

Look on the LANdb website, http://avenir.dhs.org/landb/ for more
documentation.  The website is likely to be more updated, as things are
added/changed in between versions.

-John Madden
 weez@avenir.dhs.org