[c-nsp] the sorry state of LLDP support

[Arie Vayner (avayner)]

Mark,

I have actually looked on the cisco web page, and I can see there is a
LLDP-MIB...
Take a look at this online tool:
http://tools.cisco.com/Support/SNMP/index.jsp

If you go to "View and Download MIBs", and scroll all the way down
(almost...), you would see that there is a MIB called LLDP-MIB.
The tool would allow you to download the MIB and also check if your
image has it.

Thanks
Arie

-----Original Message-----
From: cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net
[mailto:cisco-nsp-bounces at puck.nether.net] On Behalf Of Mark Boolootian
Sent: Thursday, May 24, 2007 05:23 AM
To: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: [c-nsp] the sorry state of LLDP support


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.
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