I'm the technical coordinator of a wide area networking project in
Pittsburgh, based out of the PSC. We've got some 18 sites connected to
the Internet, and I've just started poking around with tkined. Here are
some comments and questions.
First, let me say I'm very impressed with tkined, and am glad that
someone (anyone!) is working on a freely available tool of this sort.
IP Discovery: One can discover by network and by route. This is nice,
by has a couple of problems:
1) discovery seems to get a bit confused in class B subnets -- so if I
traceroute from, say, 147.72.56.1 to somewhere, the resulting diagram
shows me connected to the 147.72 class B, and then that's conected to
147.72.1, which is then connected to a router...when in reality I'm
directly connected to the router via a slip line. this seems a little
strange. Basically to get an accurate picture I'm forced to do the probe
from -outside- of the network....
2) discovery seems to act inconsistently with routers with multiple (say,
8) interfaces. For example, I can discover 2 or 3 networks and it
correctly identifies them as all connected to the same router; discover
others, and it creates a discrete object, even though it's just another
interface of the original object. Is this a bug, or am I doing something
wrong?
What's I'd -really- love is "discovery by feeling around". In other
words, you give it the address of a router, and tell it "find all routers
3 or fewer hops away." For an example of a monitoring tool that does
this, check out "Intermapper", a Mac program from ftp.dartmouth.edu.
It's the only thing I've ever found a Mac useful for, other than word
processing. This feature is important if tkined is to be used for wide
area network monitoring, as (for example) we've got 18 class C's to
manage (and some class B subnets) which have no logical relation; but
with this feature it could be discovered from the routers themselves.
Likewise, it would be tres cool if you could limit -what- gets discovered
(i.e. probe 192.221.244 and "only show ciscos").
Well, this is beginning to sound like a wish list, and I know the answer
to some of these things will inevitably be "sounds good -- go program it
yourself!" But I thought I'd share my thoughts and see if anyone else
has the same needs.
"The law locks up both man and woman / Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose / Who steals the common from the goose." -anon
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Peter Berger - peterb@telerama.lm.com - http://www.lm.com/~peterb