[c-nsp] the sorry state of LLDP support

[Mark Boolootian]

Our campus relies quite heavily on netdisco <http://netdisco.org> and
netdisco relies quite heavily on a functioning, homogenous underlying
L2 discovery protocol.  The proliferation of incompatible L2 discovery 
protocols has always been a problem for netdisco, but the development
and (eventual) widespread adoption of LLDP will remedy that.  

Support for LLDP is improving - HP offers it, I think Extreme will soon, 
Foundry will have it come summer and it has finally arrived for Cisco.
Sort of.

The latest release for the 2960/3560/3750 claims to have support for
LLDP.  A bit of testing reveals that while LLDP support is indeed in 
the code, the only method of accessing the LLDP info is via the CLI.  
There is no SNMP support for it.  There is no LLDP MIB nor is the 
LLDP data installed into the CDP MIB.

I queried Cisco about when support for the LLDP MIB was planned, and I 
received this truly remarkable response:

  I've learned that LLDP MIB is not on the roadmap and there are currently
  no engineering resources working on this.  We leverage this code from
  our network management business unit and we will continue to push for
  that business unit to prioritize this feature.  I don't know why this
  was left out in the first place.

Perhaps their plan is to populate the CDP MIB with info learned via LLDP, 
but given they didn't bother doing that with the current release, it doesn't
strike me as likely.  Why Cisco seems to think there's no need to bother
implementing the LLDP MIB is difficult for me to guess.  Perhaps others
have some clue that I lack.

Cisco is doing a good job of encouraging us to buy their competitor's products.