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Need free or cheap network discovery tool and information about vlan's/trunking/tagging ports

I started working for a university this past week. This is only the second enterprise level network I have worked with and they are several years apart. I want to get up to speed on vlan's and trunking...tagging and untagging. I need a real understanding of this as there are thousands of VLAN's in use on the network. I also am looking for a discovery tool that can search across the network and identify our switches/routers and servers. The documentation is very poor and I want to get a grasp on this ASAP. Any feedback is appreciated!

sAiyAnstAr

Hi there,

There are a few good free tools available here:

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/solarwinds_free_tools/

Give that a go and see if that suits your requirements.

Marius Gunnerud

here are a couple of generic sites you can look at for trunking and vlans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_LAN

http://www.formortals.com/an-introduction-to-vlan-trunking/

Wireshark is another good network monitoring tool. Also I know Cisco has built in tools and commands you can use. If you have other hardware then I am sure they also have commands or tools you can use to do the same.

eeRoot

http://www.angryip.org/w/Home
http://nmap.org/
http://www.radmin.com/products/ipscanner/

There are plenty of tools for scanning networks, identifying VLAN's can be ab it trickier. For VLAN's, you best bet is to locate the VLAN/spanning tree root of the network and start mapping out the VLAN's you see from there.

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Kenmcse1969

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eeRoot

Take a look at Packet Trap PT460

http://download.cnet.com/PacketTrap-pt360-ToolSuite-Pro/3000-2651_4-10769728.html

J C

ASKER

Ken,

Will it install on top of the Ubuntu linux distribution?

Kenmcse1969

I have it installed on CentOS but it will install on Ubuntu, my original install was on Ubuntu but I had a server issue and when I resinstalled I wanted to try a different version since I had such a hard time getting it working. Your first time going around, please take my advice and install on CentOS and use the install script found here...it will make your life easier. Now if your a Linux expert, then disregard :-)

http://www.auburn.edu/~gouldwp/netdisco/

Here is the webpage to install manually. Join up for the mailing list, you can ask questions and get great support. I lived off the thing during my initial setup. Hope this helps.

http://netdisco.org/install.html