On Oct 15, 2008, at 1:35 PM, Colin Alston wrote:
On 2008/10/15 06:29 PM Colin Alston wrote:
Is there any kind of cunning trick to detect standard layer2
switches along a path without stuff like STP?
Apparently there isn't. Lots of people mentioned other tools, the
problem there is they have one thing in common which is polling
SNMP. I think it scales badly in general.
What is your reasoning behind this claim? I would claim
quite the opposite compared to CLI or TL1.
Maybe there should be something (I mean like, someone should come
up with a standard :P) to trace switches in a path
I've written a cruddy script that given a seed bridge, scrapes
L2 information obtained via CDP (I guess it could do LLDP, too)
and does a breadth-first search through a network. Then I just
dump that into gnuplot format. Getting the data is easy compared
to visualization.
A coworker of mine has written script to ask Rapid-STP speaking
switches about their current topology and builds a graph again
in gnuplot format.
A more challenging approach would be to scrape the mac forwarding
tables and stitch things together. This would have to be done
per-vlan. I think this approach (or similar) might be done by
Openview's L2 featureset.
Dale
--
Dale W. Carder - Network Engineer
University of Wisconsin / WiscNet
http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~dwcarder