Device discovery purely based on IP?

sunsson · ‎12-11-2007

Here's the situation:

My customer has an MPLS network consisting of the corporate LAN and branch office LANs across the country, and would like to inventory and remotely manage the networking infrastructure. Not all the networking gear has SNMP enabled - there is no accurate list of all networking gear either.

1. Can device discovery be done purely based on IP range? If yes, how would i do it?

2. If the above is possible, can I then enable SNMP globally? How would I do that?

akemp · ‎12-11-2007

This sounds painful. Do you have anything to work with such as an addressing schema ? Any idea about the typical configuration of devices (like default community strings if SNMP is even enabled, is CDP enabled, etc)

Any sort of survey tools available like Solarwinds ? HP Openview ? Ciscoworks Campus ?

sunsson · ‎12-11-2007

They have Ciscoworks LMS. But before I start working on a project plan, I want to confirm that LMS (RME??) can be used to discover the network infrastructure based on IP range (SNMP is only enabled on a few devices)

miheg · ‎12-11-2007

Only Campus can discover.

They can do this via a range ping scan in the most recent version (3.0)

But the next step is to ask the device what kind of device it is. This is done using SNMP.

If that is not configured then it will not find the device.

Technically it is possible to discover devices via telnet but I don't know any commercial product that does that.

AFAIK all packages rely on SNMP being configured on the devices you want to discover.

Cheers,

Michel

David Stanford · ‎12-12-2007

Currently CiscoWorks Campus Manager cannot discover without both snmp and cdp. However, the next release of CM will allow more flexibility in discovery with other methods (an earlier post mentioned this)

As a minimum you will need this for the snmp config:

snmp-server community public RO

Just replace public with your comm string