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Port uptime/downtime history on 2960 switches

robert.brink
Level 1
Level 1

I'm wondering if there is any way to find out usage statistics for individual client ports on the 2960 switches?

We have some switches in remote offices in which almost all client ports are connected, but we doubt that they are all in regular use. Is there any way to see if port x has been disconnected for 10 days or if port y has been connected since 2 hours?

I checked Cisco Network Assistant (v5.2) but couldn't find any history per client port there. Does anybody know?

BR,

Robert

7 Replies 7

Kevin Dorrell
Level 10
Level 10

Robert,

This may be difficult to find out in practice, especially because most PC's, when they are shut down, still give a standby "connected" signal to the network. You would have to disable the "WakeOnLAN" feature.

One way you could do it is to enable link-status traps, and run a syslog server to trap all the link state changes. That would work, but it would be an awful lot to work to process the information. In addition, it is surprisingly difficult to distinguish between a PC being logged out as for a PC being logged in.

If you have a network management station, you could get it to ping all the clients at regular intervals and log the results. But that is a useful technique only if you are running static IP addresses, i.e. not DHCP.

Also with a network management station (or MTRG), you could get it to log traffic statistics for each port at regular intervals using SNMP.

If you have Windows server, you could get some information from the Windows event logs. That would be per client, and not per switchport though.

Ok, maybe I explained myself somewhat fussy, let's see if I can clarify:

What I meant is that all client ports in the switch are patched in, but not all ports are actually in use by client computers etc.

What I want to see (which I think our old ProCurve switches could show) is for how long the client port has been in use or for how long it has NOT been in use.

We don't want to run all over the office and check if every network outlet is in use or not, it would be much easier to retrieve this info from the switch.

Hope this explains my problem better.

/Robert

I'm not sure there's anything that does exactly what you want - but one option would be to clear the interface counters on all of the ports and by seeing which stay at 0 and which stay at 0 and which don't you'll see which are being used.

Other than that you can keep the logs (to a syslog server or whatever) and keep a record of what ports go up and down over a set period of time.

Apart from that there's no 1 command that does exactly what you're after as far as I know.

Hope that helps somewhat!

Anthony

I don't know about the 2960's but i know on the 4500 series switches there is a command that will show you I just don't remember off the top of my head what it is . Once i get into one of our switches I'll post that command and you can see if it works on the 2960's , don't believe it worked on the older 2950 series so i don't know if it will work on the 2960's or not .

This works on the 4500's don't know if it will on the 2960's , did not see it in the command lookup tool for 2960 code. For 4500 series switches , it is "show interfaces link" . this tells you how long the port has been down in weeks , hours, minutes,seconds....

Thanks for your answer, but unfortunately this command isn't available at the 2960. I'll have to see if there is any other way to solve this.

Thanks anyway,

Robert

dave.keith
Level 1
Level 1

Using SNMP you can get :

sysUpTime

ifOperStatus

ifLastChange

So, get the sysUpTime for a reference.

Get the operational status (up or down)

Get the last change, which is the value of sysuptime when the port went into the current operstaus. Any interfaces that are down and have a lastchange of about 0 have been down since the switch powered on (cold start). Otherwise they have been down for the period sysuptime-iflastchange.

You could plot the value of ifOperStatus using MRTG to get a visual indication. I use GetIf for these little jobs, it's a very handy lttle SNMP utility.

If you are not familiar with SNMP be warned that the interface index may or may not be what you expect .... verify the indexes by walking the ifDescr values.

Dave

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