[70255] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Network discovery tools
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Boolootian)
Thu May 6 12:00:15 2004
Date: Thu, 6 May 2004 08:59:34 -0700
From: Mark Boolootian <booloo@ucsc.edu>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Reply-To: booloo@ucsc.edu
Mail-Followup-To: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <D4915B279E169F4992940DFF313EB4BF24653C@MERC21.na.sas.com>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> The best GPL tool that I've come across in a long while, as far as
> network discovery goes, would have to be the discovery engine inside
> Netdisco (http://www.netdisco.org). This tool is fairly Cisco-centric,
> but Max has put a lot of work into a tool for folks who are tired of
> CiscoWorks not working.
netdisco does automated topology discovery for CDP-speaking devices
(where the C is Cisco and not Cabletron). That includes Cisco gear
and some HP stuff (at least the ProCurve line of switches - not sure
what else they have it in). netdisco will also do topology discovery
using Bay's discovery protocol (though this probably only exists in
old stuff and likely didn't make the cut in the move to Nortel). There's
some hope for using the work done by some guys at Bell Labs to do the L2
topology discovery relying on existing MIBs (primarily the BRIDGE MIB),
and there is proof-of-concept code, but that's mostly wishful thinking
at this point.
