Technology or Die

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 →

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 →