Whats plugged into what port on what switch? (HP ProCurve switches)

[steven_layton_sl]

I'm doing a lot of updating of my documentation at the moment, with the ideal goal of having end to end documentation of what is plugged into what. I've recently completed updating the core to edge switching documentation, and am moving onto the edge switch ports.

 

Ideally l'd like to know the host names of what is plugged into every port on each edge switch. Is there a quick way of pulling this information off the HP ProCurve switches, without having to do the manual check of looking at the wall point, and tracing that back to a switch/port?

[pantscat]

Kinda... you can do a "show mac-address" which will show you what the mac addresses are at the end of each port - you might then be able to cross reference this with an inventory or something (DHCP leases perhaps)?

 

"show lldp info remote" will also show the details of any lldp aware devices connected to those ports... other switches, IP phones, etc.

Edited April 6, 2017 by pantscat

[Norphy]

A piece of software like Nedi (free), Observium (free) or LanSweeper (free for 100 devices) will do that for you. Nedi is very good. A bit of a pain to set up but good once it's going.

[RichCowell]

Spiceworks has that information, when you're looking at a decide on the inventory it will tell you which port of which switch it's plugged into, so I'd guess there's a way of getting that data out as it's just on a database... there may even be a tool / add-in already to do it... that's where I'd start though if I was doing that as we use Spiceworks already...

[mdrabble]

Ive used Managed Switch Port Mapping Tool - (free for 30 days) Managed Switch Port Mapping Tool

[Trevelyan]

From a slightly different angle, I have developed a program that does something similar, although it grabs data from hosts instead of switches.

 

Its a really simple libpcap application that you can run manually on every PC (like using a Fluke tool on a port) or set to automatically check as a PC starts up and record the results in a database without any input. I have a bit of PHP that then pulls all the machines and their details out of the database and you can filter them and suchlike. Its part of a bigger project I'm working on, but you can use it to record the host and switch port details, which you can either cross-reference with an SNMP-generated list or you can work it out for yourself from the tables in the database.

 

If its something anyone would be interested in, feel free to get in touch. I use it at a college in Luton, as well as where I worked before at a University.