Slightly-Offtopic - Networking audit question

Travis Roy travis at scootz.net
Tue Aug 17 19:43:01 EDT 2004


Brian wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 16:44, Travis Roy wrote:
> 
>>My company is doing an audit to find out what customers are connected to 
>>  what switch ports.
>>This is our current procedure:
>>
>>1.  Determine one of the IP addresses that the customer is using.
> 
> 
> What if they have 3 machines in a subnet?  Does every customer get
> exactly one ethernet feed, and then they supply their own switch/hub for
> multiple machines?

99% of the time, yes. They get just one feed and they usually have a 
switch or a hub. We generally don't have access to these devices.

In cases where they have more then one feed we can combine them in the 
program we use for billing (CyberGuage)


> FWIW, it's handy to label the switch ports with the customer name as
> they are assigned.  Maybe you already know this and are doing it for new
> customers, but I just thought I would mention it.

Well, yah :) We plan on doing that once we figure out what is what and 
keep them updated. Until myself and a coworker were hired there was 
really only one tech that had to do everything. Stuff happens, you do 
things in a hurry, you can see how things get confused.

> At my last job, I wrote a collection of perl scripts that basically
> managed customer data, IP subnet, and could configure Cisco equipment
> with SNMP.  All of what you are doing could probably be handled with a
> handful of perl and a little bit of seed information (Like customer
> name, subnet, etc).  However, you probably don't want to go learning
> SNMP and all that just for this little project.  I would suggest you
> look at the Net::Telnet::Cisco perl module (I'm pretty sure that is/was
> the name of it).  

Thanks for the tip, I'll be sure to check it out.

> If all your gear is already setup with SNMP communities and stuff (I
> assume it is for basic monitoring), you could download a 30-day trial of
> WhatsUp Gold, which will walk your network and pretty much map it all
> out for you.

We currently use WUG for alerts.. It doesn't map customer equipment that 
it can't get access to.. Most of the stuff is dumb hubs/switches that 
don't give you any information. Also, I can't really go 
portscanning/pinging the crap out of the network, and that's what WUG 
does when you do autodiscover. We did that the first time we set it up 
and the phone was ringing off the hook with people thinking they were 
being hacked.. We had a couple customers say that they would leave if we 
did it again, even if it was a planned event and announced.



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