You're on your own to look up MIBs for the MAC address tables, but here's a Google search to get you started. Use SNMP to query this data, which will eliminate the need for a script to actually log in to switches and run commands. I can recommend using Perl's Net::Appliance::Session or Python's exscript to make this happen (this assumes you have access to a *NIX box). This will eliminate the need for you to chase down MACs on your edge switches, which is most of the legwork it seems. You'll want to exclude trunk interfaces for this, but it would be trivial to create a hash (or dict for you python people) with the keys being the edge switches and the values being another hash that's basically "mac.addr -> interface". Have a script that logs in to each one of your edge devices and grabs the MAC address tables off of them.
There are a couple of ways to do this on the cheap (the exercise of research and/or implementation I'll leave up to you). I've tried "show ip dhcp binding | inc " it gives me a strange MAC (with 2 extra characters) that is not the associated device MAC, I have not looked into this yet, but ARP is accurate and I'm more concerned with finding the switch port the offending machine is connected to. I try to provide some management and a bit of security. There is no central DNS or Active Directory it is like a Guest Network, where only internet access is provided. Assuming that you have copied the file to /tmp.
because my approach only works while the user is still connected, and no value when i review the logs in the morning, but the device is no longer connected. This option requires internet access so if for some reason your server cannot access internet you could manually download the file from OUI Database copy it to your Cacti's box and import it by hand as follow. Specifically I'm looking for the switch-port the user is connected to ? also some history would be great.
In an all Cisco shop, with minimal budget using Cisco switches, there must be a more efficient way to track down host machines ? The MacTrack plugin is designed to scan network switches, routers and intellegent hubs for connected devices, and record their location either based upon the. Huge VLANs (/16) with a few hundred users on each VLAN Sometimes this can take logging in to ~7 switches, there are specific challenges to this network that I can do nothing about at the moment. logon to that switch rinse and repeat until I locate the workstation.Mac address lookup to see which switch it was learned from.Logon to a core switch in the same VLAN.I sometimes need to do this, if a workstation IP address, shows up on an ACL Deny What is the best method of locating a particular workstation on a VLAN ?