Listing available ports on a switch

[bruno.manzoni]

Hello,

Here is my problem: I have plenty of 48 ports switches (IOS, CatOS), and they all have been cabled: since a long time, as soon as a new connection was needed, a new port was used. Then, many of the ports are now unused, but we don't know which are concerned. I would like to list the ports I could use, rather than installing always more switches.

Has somebody any tool/program I could use? Latest version of CiscoWorks? Of course I'm looking for an automatised solution, as I have plenty of devices to scan.

Thank you for your advices,

Regards,

Thierry

[frenzeus]

Hi Thierry,

I find Solarwinds to be a rather great tool for engineers. Get the engineers edition and u get a whole load of tools for network management, especially cisco networks.

One of the tools that comes together with the software is switchport mapper, it does a scan on the ports of the switch u specify and returns mac addresses learned from each port. By that, u will at least know, which ports does not have dynamic mac-add mapped to it and thus increasing the chances that those ports are not in use.

I think they offer a 90 days-trial version.

This is not a promotion of the software, but i happen to find it rather useful.

Hope it helps.

[milan.kulik]

Hi,

here is the CiscoWorks solution:

http://forums.cisco.com/eforum/servlet/NetProf?page=netprof&CommCmd=MB%3Fcmd%3Dpass_through%26location%3Doutline%40%5E1%40%40.1dd751d3/2#selected_message

You can configure User Tracking to remove MAC address entries from the CW database if older then 30 days, e.g. So when you see no MAC addresses attached to the interface via User Tracking, you have quite a good probability this interface has not been used for a month.

Regards,

Milan