Thunderbolt fails to find Wii but finds BluRay player

[Brian Bergin]

Ok, so this isn't a home too, yet, but I brought a Wii to the office along with a couple of other devices (like a Sony BluRay player) to see what Thunderbolt said about those.  It found the BluRay player (wired - Thunderbolt didn't know what it was but it found it), but it cannot find the Wii (wireless).  The Wii is pingable and can use the Internet so I know it's available to Thunderbolt.

[Michael Holloway]

Brian,

Is the Wii on the same VLAN as the TB appliance?  I also have a Wii and TB does see it.  It's identified as an unknown device, but the oui_vendor and firmware are listed on the Portal (Edit Device > Information tab) as Nintendo Co, Ltd.

-mike

[Brian Bergin]

Yes, it's connected to the WAP4410N on the same VLAN.  I think the discovery is just taking much longer than I expected it to for some devices.  I added it manually and then a while later an unknown device showed up with the same MAC and IP address.  That's a problem in and of itself if I add a device manually and then it detects the same MAC address the portal should ask "hey, I found a device that appears to have been manually added, would you like to add, replace, merge, or ignore the new discovery?"

[Michael Holloway]

Brian, when you added the device manually, did you manually enter the MAC address for it as well?  If a newly discovered host has the same MAC address as a manually added host, then such a merger happens automatically, and any sensors you already set up on the manually entered host are preserved.   From that point forward, the entity is no longer treated as manually added device, it has been discovered.

In the case that a manually added host is added with just the IP address, there's not really a way to automatically merge the two hosts, as merging on just IP addresses isn't a good choice, especially considering DHCP networks.  If I understand, you are asking for the ability to (manually) merge a manually entered host (with no MAC address defined) with a host that has been detected (has a known MAC address), and I'm wondering what the interface could look like.  What information would you want to preserve about the manually entered host?  The device description and possibly the sensors you had already defined on it?  What are your thoughts?

-mike

[Brian Bergin]

No, I didn't add the MAC address, I assume, apparantly wrongfully so, that TBA would go out and discover the device and populate the rest of the fields.

BTW, it finds the Wii now, but it has it connected to the ESW not the WAP and this Wii is wireless only so it's connected to the WAP4410N not directly to the ESW.

[Michael Holloway]

Sounds like we're not seeing the Wii in the WAP's CAM table, the equivalent of 'show arp'.  I know that we still have some corner-cases with discovery of correct network topology, so the manual Link/Unlink button (second from the left in the Topology screen) can be used to correct this. 

There are some times that for one reason or another we just can't accurately tell which device is behind another device.  We may never get to 100% accuracy, just because there may be devices that we absolutely can't talk to to query their ARP table (likely only other vendor's gear), but during the trial we've only added explicit support for querying the WAP4410N and ESW's.   If you expect more devices to be added to the network via WiFi, you might make the WAP the root device so that newly discovered hosts for which we're unable to determine correct topology for will default to being connected to the WAP.

-mike