Author Archives: Adam

Discovering a Cisco Network with CDP (Part 3)

This is part 3 of the series on network discovery using CDP. If you have not read the first or second parts you can find them HERE and HERE. So far we have looked at mapping the infrastructure with CDP as well as actually mapping hosts (by MAC address) to switch ports. I wanted to take the opportunity, in this write up, to step away from the Cisco command line and look at another product that leverages CDP: VMware. As you already know CDP is simply a packet emitted from physical ports of Cisco devices. Anything that cares to listen … Continue reading

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Windows 7 Local Logon Trick

By this point most business workstation computers are setup as domain members. If changes need to be made you log on as a domain user with administrative privileges and make system changes. If you need to logon locally for some reason you type the account name in the HOSTNAME\USERNAME format. DOMAIN\USERNAME will then get you back in as a domain user. Typically, through my experience anyhow, PC names are printed on a label and stuck to the box itself or are readily apparent in some way. One network I found myself supporting used the service tags as part of the … Continue reading

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Discovering a Cisco Network with CDP (Part 2)

Part one of this two part series talked about walking out your network with CDP. This is useful when all you need to know is the topology of the network equipment its self. The next step in the process is to map out where servers or other hosts are located. The first way of doing this would be to log onto the host, capture packets, and look for a CDP packet that indicates the switch name and port that the host is connected to. This would require packet capture software on each system and is really not practical. The second … Continue reading

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Discovering a Cisco Network with CDP (Part 1)

If you have ever been dropped face first into an undocumented Cisco network with little Cisco experience you may have found yourself overwhelmed. Fortunately for admins who have no desire to tone cables or read long mac address tables there is a simple way to map out a network like this. The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is the answer. There are a few prerequisites but overall the process is fairly simple. First, CDP must be enabled on all of the devices and ports you would like to discover. This typically is the case as CDP is enabled by default on … Continue reading

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