Comware

Hi Guys,

Wonder if anyone could help me with the following scenario:

I work at a large College, We use all HP Procurve gear, 9300's in the core and a mixture of 2500's 2600's 4100's and 5300's at the edge.

We have a lot of students who bring there laptops into the classrooms and plug them into the network. This means they get a DHCP address from our server so we can identify them by name, IP and MAC address as soon as they plug in. What i want to be able to do is find out, quickly, which switch port they are connected to so we can go and have words with them. The only way i can think is to do a Show Mac on the switches themselves, But with 50 or so devices, that could take forever.

Any idea's would be really appreciated. We run HP Procurve Manager Plus as well, in case that is of any use!

Cheers

Jonathan Axford

I presume then you do not quarantine connections using HP's ACL security. Have you had a look at IDM?
http://www.hp.com/rnd/products/management/idm/overview.htm

I use Fluke OVC by configuring it to throw a trap when a new device is found. Unfortunately, OVC does not do a detailed discovery right away. I can use my Fluke WGA to query the MAC tables on all the switches but it is time consuming.

I have not looked at the IDM stuff yet. What does the quarantine feature do?

I have not studied in detail yet, the access security features and am not even sure whether all the models you list support it. There is however some good reading in the PDFs that ship with the product. IDM is a new add-on to PCM+ 1.6 which I only glanced at. You can find out more about it by browsing to ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/networking/software/IDM1-0-Release-Notes.htm

I had a similar requirement to identify hosts on our ProCurve based network, and found a free product called NeDi which does exactly what I want. It uses CDP on the ProCurves to build up a dynamic list of network nodes, which can then be searched by name, ip, mac etc and give you the exact switch/port location of the node.

It runs on Linux, and takes a little while to setup, but it is without a doubt one of the best tools I've implemented recently (there's a new version due soon as well, promising even more features)

Check out http://nedi.web.psi.ch/ for more info

That sounds like the sort of thing, Not sure if i will be able to blag the Linux side of things though. We are a completely MS network and i have no experience with Linux yet! I asked the same question to the HP support team, They replied with

"Use the Show Mac command to see what macc addresses are on a switch"

So they weren't very helpfull! Basically, all i want to do is stop un-authorized devices from being able to access the network. I know that this is possible, but i don't know how!

Hello !


Maybe 802.1x is what you are looking for ?

Then users have to authenticate (usernam/password) to get access to the switch port. If they don't have a valid username/password, then they don't get access to the network.

802.1x works in Microsoft enviroment.

Cheers for th info, We are looking into the Fluke gear at the moment, and have also set up port-security on some of our network, So the rogue devices should now be prevented from access.