It's been almost exactly one month since my last entry on DeepMac's goals and I'm happy to say significant progress has been made!

The biggest achievement is getting the project finally organized, with clear goals, usable data and a skeletal framework. But that's kind of broad, so let's breakdown what has been achieved:

1. Historical creation dates for OUIs have been documented going back to 1998, thanks mostly to archive.org and the magic of Google. Thus the creation of the DeepMac knowledgebase!
2. An automatic archiving of the IEEE OUI listing in text format has been established, running on a daily basis.
3. Simple perl scripts have been written to convert the IEEE OUI file (oui.txt) into a tab-delimited format, one OUI per line, and to add OUI creation dates from the DeepMac knowledgebase.
4. An actual MySQL database has been created and another perl script used to load some of the knowledgebase data into the MySQL database.
5. A horribly primitive PHP interface has been written to allow very basic searching of the DeepMac database.

There is still an enormous amount to accomplish with this project. I've been thinking about where the focus should be and while I really want to evangelize the project and get input from the big boys in networking, it seems to me that it will never be managable until the project is fully organized and has the tools it needs. So the push for now is going to be on continuing to refine the MySQL database for DeepMac in terms of structure, and lots of work on a web-based front-end.

Ideally, it should be possible to not only fully search DeepMac on-line but also submit information, and for administrators to update the contents including approving submissions for inclusion. That's a tall order, so the first sub-goal here will be to whip the search inteface into shape and allow full searching on multiple fields with varying levels of output detail.