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Managing inactive ports on switches.

mgwood
Level 1
Level 1

Can anyone suggest a method to determine if a switch port has been inacitve for a period of time? As an example, a switch port in a telecom closet might be cross connected to a workstation, but if the local workstation team is not diligent in removing cross connects to unused work areas a person might not know that a port could be available for another user. It is easy to mark conf room connections that might be used intermittently, but at an given time would not have a connection light on the switch, but ports that are connected and not 'really' in use are another challenge. I need something that can query the switch and provide a time period ie. 60 days port usage report or availablity report.

I don't believe there is any reporting that can be done in CiscoWorks that would provided that information.

Would anyone have any suggestions on how else this might be done?

6 Replies 6

Joe Clarke
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Currently not. Campus Manager offers switch port capacity planning reports, but you cannot currently adjust the days which a port is down. The next release of LMS will contain updated reports that will allow you to see all ports that have been down for the past 30 days (or less up to one day).

To do this kind of thing manually, you could poll all ports that are admin down. If the port is admin down, chances are it is available for new users (where it to be turned up). For ports that are admin up, but operationally down, poll the ifLastChange object for the port. It will give you a value of sysUpTime when the port last changed state. Compare this to the current value of sysUpTime for the device. If the difference is greater than the desired number of days, the port can be reclaimed.

I was certainly hoping to be able to set a value greater than 30 days in LMS 3.0.

for example: report on ports that have been admin up and oper status down for periods greater than 30, 60, 90 and 120 days would be optimal.

30 days or less gives little flexibility....

If your network is not super large in size, you might try solarwinds @ solarwinds.net; they have a 30 day trial option.

I believe the switch port mapper module provides this capability. I think all you have to do is configure a column to report on oper status last changed.

http://solarwinds.net/resources/democenter/Toolsets/SPMFlash.htm

If you're a programmer or know someone who is, maybe they could write a perl script or something to easily do this:

The formula to calculate the value is:

RESULT1= snmpwalk .1.3.6.1.2.1.1.3 - sysUptime

RESULTS2= snmpwalk .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.8 - ifOperStatus - Find down ports

RESULTS3= snmpwalk .1.3.6.1.2.1.2.2.1.9 - ifLastChange

DOWNTIME of a port= ( RESULT1 - RESULTS3 ) / 8640000

Sorry, I should clarify. There are two options in the new CM 5.0 switch port reports. One allows to to report on ports that have not been used for x number of days (where x <= 30). The other option is to show unused ports that have not been used since a certain date. This option allows you to specify an arbitrary date. Therefore, the report allows you to go back as far as needed.

Thanks for the clarification!

have a look at

http://switchmap.sourceforge.net/

its a good tool to report on inactive ports over the lan ( I do not know how good it scales in big environments)

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