Network Diagrams:Zones on a Diagram With Visio Shape Union

Drawing Firewall Clusters

When draw­ing dual layer fire­wall clusters, we need to clearly show the dif­fer­ent zones in between the fire­walls. For example, let say that we need to rep­res­ent two DMZ between an external and internal fire­walls. Here is how you might want it to look:

Now this looks pretty obvi­ous to most people who have done this before, and I didn’t think much of it until one of my col­leagues poin­ted out the shapes in the middle. How did I draw them ?

Drawing odd shaped.……um, shapes

Strangely, this is a really simple fea­ture in Visio. I’ll assume that you have read some of the other posts on Network Diagrams and know how to put this dia­gram together.

Start by draw­ing the box that you want to rep­res­ent the area:

Duplicate that box (Control-​​D), and rotate (Control-​​R) and then make it a bit smal­ler with your mouse.

Now select all the three objects, then Shape, Operations, Union

and this is what you should have. An oddly shaped shape.

Now send it to the back:

Styling

As far as Visio is con­cerned, this is still just a box. So all the other meth­ods for styl­ing the box for col­our, line and dis­tor­tion are still pos­sible. Such as chan­ging the line style, or mak­ing the corners more curved:

But try to keep it in good taste. An ugly net­work dia­gram is still ugly.

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