Opensource alternative to Microsoft Visio – LibreOffice Draw

I love to make new diagrams for networking designs. This task occupies a lot of my time on my job working as a networking engineer.

In past I’ve used Microsoft Visio for that kind of tasks, but as I’ve made a switchover to Ubuntu as my primary Operating System, I had to find an alternative drawing program for  making the diagrams. The best solution I’ve found was OpenOffice Draw (now is called LibreOffice Draw). I’ve  continued to use Cisco network Topology icons – they can be easily used in LibreOffice – you just have to do copy/paste from folder where they are stored. I prefer to use the small blue colored ones – you can download them in JPEG format directly from the following link: http://bit.ly/hnd2a5

They really look clean and are very small in size so a lot of them can fit on one network diagram:

So here is an example of a networking diagram I made with LibreOffice Draw (Virtual Private Dial Up Network with L2TP used for tunneling PPPoE sessions between Network Service Provider and Local ISP which owns the local loop  – you can read more on this matter on Cisco’s site here: http://bit.ly/fAuGOV):