Microsoft® Office Visio® 2003 Inside Out

Defining Network Topology

The place to start when diagramming a network is with the physical topology. Both Visio Standard and Visio Professional include shapes for linear (straight) bus, star, star-wired (token ring), dual ring (FDDI), and linear bus Ethernet topologies. The topology shapes all work in a similar manner. You drop them on the drawing page first. Then you add the nodes you want to display and drag them into approximate position around the topology shape. To connect them, drag a yellow control handle from the topology shape and glue it to a blue connection point on another shape, as Figure 14-4 shows. The handle turns red when it’s glued.

Figure 14-4. To connect nodes to a network, drag a yellow control handle from the topology shape ...