Computer connection detector

[shayes]

Hi,

 

I have inherited a very badly managed network. Basically I have a cabinet in my office that has Cat5 cables going into switches, and what is on the other end of those wires is anybody's guess. I could just about tell you which two cables connect to our primary servers but that is about it.

 

We had a switch blow the other day, so I ended up having to pretty much plug everything into either the core switch or another switch in the cabinet that looks like it was put in when Noah used to work here before he went off sailing in his ark.

 

I have a new 48 port switch that I am putting in so I'm trying to sort out this mess in the process. Basically I just want to put my servers and links to secondary switches into the core switch, and anything else into the new switch. The problem is, how do I know which is which, some of the cables are labelled, but some rooms have moved around here in the past 5 years or so, so I'm not even sure if the labels correspond to where they're actually going.

 

What I think would be useful, is some software that can detect every device on the network, and then report if something gets disconnected. I can then deduce what is what by unplugging things one at a time from the switch. Does anyone know of such a thing that would do what I require?

 

Unless there's an easier way to do this?

[mikeyd101]

Here are a few that I use, I'm still trying to figuring out our network infrastructure.

 

The switches themselves can have good information (are they managed switches?) in the arp and lldp tables which might get you some mac address and port information if your lucky. You might also need to enable lldp or find the vendor specific discovery/neighbour.

Nmap Software is good for scanning ip ranges and getting ip <-> mac relationships.

The Dude is good monitoring and discovery (tho I found it easier to just add devices I wanted to monitor manually)

 

And like you said disconnecting things and seeing what goes down.