Netdisco
Overview
Nodes and Devices
Devices are network devices such as routers, switches and firewalls
Nodes are end-stations connected to devices such as pcs, servers, printers and ip phones
Jobs
There are 4 principal job types:
discover: Gather information about a Device, including interfaces, vlans, PoE status, and chassis components (modules). Also learns about potential new Devices via neighbor protocols and adds jobs for their discovery to the queue. Read this for further information
Ping sweep: works with subnet, ping first, those responded will be added to job queue
macsuck: Gather MAC to port mappings from known devices reporting layer 2 reachability
arpnip: Gather Mac to IP mappings from known devices reporting layer 3 reachability
nbtstat: poll a node to obtain its NetBIOS name
Configuration
There are two configuration files: config.yml (which lives inside the Netdisco package) and deployment.yml (which usually lives in ${HOME}/environments) such as: /opt/netdisco/environments/deployment.yml
Some settings
device_auth: authentication for all polling
device_identity: control cananoical name or identity of devices in Netdisco
host_group_displaynames: assign host groups friendly names
Command
perldoc ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-do: view document about netdisco-do command
Backend Status: ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-backend status
Daemon Status: ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-daemon status
Start/Restart Webapp Server: ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-web start|restart
Start/Restart Job Control Daemon: ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-backend start|restart: this start those job like device polling, port control, etc
First manual discovery: ${HOME}/bin/netdisco-do discover -d $NameorIPofseedDevice
Add ping sweep task to the queue: netdisco-do pingsweep -d 192.0.2.0/24 --enqueue
Do task with debugging: netdisco-do discover -d $ipaddress -DIQ: D for debugging, I for SNMP::Info and Q for SQL tracing
SNMP Community string is hidden by default, so to show it: SHOW_COMMUNITY=1 ~/bin/netdisco-do discover -d $ipaddress -DIQ
Netdisco-do
Dump an SNMP object for a device:
Interactive SQL terminal on Netdisco DB
See how Netdisco has parsed the configuration file
Troubleshooting
Cisco Device - Device name doesn't match hostname
When searching for device using device hostname, device is listed with a different name rather than its hostname.
Cause: This is because it has a DNS A or PTR record with that name. Solution is changing it
Cause: It doesn't have dns name, but information is old. Delete it using netdisco-do delete -d $name and rediscover using netdisco-do discover -d $name
Reference
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