1. Home
  2. Cisco Systems
  3. Unused switch port report for 1/3 months

Unused switch port report for 1/3 months

Hi,

We have around 500 access switches in our network. Our management periodically needs to know how many of these ports are not used for a month / 3 month period so that the ports can be reused. What is the best way to achieve this as we are looking for 24,000 ports periodically and manually this is not possible.

I can think of the following options and this where i am stuck on those:

  1. Perl has a way to extract information from the switch. I am more into networking so dont know much about how to implement it, but i know there exists one as i have seen it being used.
  2. We can use MIB'to collect the port status and last uptime status, but not sure which one to use.
  3. We can use some ready tools for this, not sure which one

It would be great if anyone can help out here. Most of the switches are 2950 and 4500 series.

Cheers, Jowan.

Reply to
jowan.p
Loading thread data ...

I don't happen to have copy/paste capabilities to the way I'm posting right at the moment or I would copy in an exact URL.

I suggest that you go to google groups and review the (one) hit you would get by searching for

group:comp.dcom.sys.cisco author:roberson unused port

Reply to
Walter Roberson

Hi Jowan,

I think the easiest thing will be to clear all port counters periodically, and check later, if there is any traffic counters increased since clearing. For example, if you read all ports counters, and see the port with all zeros, it means that port was never used since counters were cleared. You can do it, for example, weekly or monthly, and then generate the report. To read counters you can use Perl and SNMP. And to clear counters you may need to do a Telnet.

Good luck,

Mike CCNP, CCDP, CCSP, CCVP, MCSE W2K, MCSE+I, Security+, etc. CCIE Voice (in progress), CCIE R&S (next)

------ Headset Adapters for Cisco IP Phones

formatting link
formatting link

Reply to
headsetadapter.com

Maybe check out the solar winds orion tool, but may be overkill for one application.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Reply to
jw

I also like SolarWinds Orion and enjoy how the data is available for 3rd party application use through its standard Microsoft SQL database format. Orion collects the data and ASP webpages display it however desired!

MRTG is a free traffic graphing application that can accumilate your traffic statistics. If you get it running and have it monitor all of the switch ports, not just the ones up at initial running, then you can accumilate data of port data activitiy.

MRTG has been around for a while and relies on SNMP for collecting data. Make sure you read up on SNMP security: using a non-default community string and specifing an access list in the SNMP server command to designate what IP addresses can access that individual device via SNMP.

If you really do get MRTG running for at least one switch and are happy with it, I can advise you on easily deploying it for 500 switches. Perl scripting generated seperate MRTG configuration files, one for each device in a seperate webserver directory. A single index page referred to each device subdirectory for viewing.

----- Scott Perry Indianapolis, IN

-----

Reply to
Scott Perry

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com schrieb:

Hm - if this is the only desired data acquisition, I would use perl and snmp to check the status of every interface lets say every hour and write the results into s RDBMS. This way you can create customized reports using SQL or create a webapp to impress the boss ;-)

Maybe you can use traffstats

formatting link
It uses SNMP to collect traffic statistics and stores it all in a mysql db. Then you may write your own small tool targeting the db with your customized sql queries.

Klaus

Reply to
klaus zerwes

Hi,

Currently i'm evaluating accelops, it has a default report for this task. The report is adjustable to whatever time frame you need.

In the mean time, as this is an old post, did you get a working solution for you situation?

Regards,

Egbert

Op woensdag 3 september 2008 16:42:27 UTC+2 schreef Jowan:

Reply to
egbertbremmer

Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.