[c-nsp] Getting ARP table from SNMP

[Bill Nash]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2006, Sam Stickland wrote:

> I'm surprised at how many people are writing their own scripts to do this -
> isn't one of the three virtues of a programmer meant to be Laziness? (see Lary
> Wall).
> 
> Netdisco does a superb job of walking all the MAC/CAM and ARP tables (for,
> example IP address to switch port resolution), storing it all in a database,
> providing a nice web front-end to it and much more - all via SNMP and CDP
> discovery. I've personally found it very useful to be able to ask questions
> like, "show me all the ports with multiple MAC addresses but no CDP entry", or
> "show me all ports with a CDP neighbor entry that can't be SNMP walked". It's
> amazing how many weird or forgotten bits of network you can discover.
> 
> http://netdisco.org/
> 
> (From my own laziness perspective it's better for me to have more people using
> and contributing to it ;) )

I've played with it before, but to be fair, my code predates yours by 
about three years, and that was a revision on code I'd written before I 
left GBLX. =) When I ran across netdisco (last year), I already had code 
in play for both IOS and PowerConnect switches, both of which are floating 
around in my network.

In this case, laziness did, in fact, win out, because I wasn't going to 
replace all my toys with something else, especially since my network 
inventory is a bit deeper than what netdisco provides. =)

- billn