Slightly-Offtopic - Networking audit question

[Tom Buskey]

> My company is doing an audit to find out what customers are connected to
>   what switch ports.

trimmed

>
> Okay, so basically what I'm looking for, is there an easier way to do
> this? What would be good options to automate this? I have our IP ranges,
>  it would be nice to just feed them in then get a list of what IPs are
> connect to whatever switch port.

I've done something similar using SNMP queries.  If SNMP is enabled on
your switches you might be able to play around with snmpwalk and snmpget
to figure out the relevent info.

I did the when I was at a network R&D company.  The engineers would often
plug the prototype into the network "to see what it did w/ real traffic"
and do nasty things to the network.  I had to find the offending port and
disconnect them from the network and this was often the only way to find
out.