Programming managed switches

[jsalvador]

Do any of the Cisco switch families provide programming options whereby the port is controlled ?

Scenario:

A customer of ours has many switches at over 300 locations with PoE surveillance cameras on them. Daily there is some camera somewhere that goes "down" . After a lengthy time of  finding which camera is down and on which switch its on ...we bounce the port and the camera comes back online 99% of the time.

I'm thinking the switch could be programmed to do this. The program "learns" the port behavior and if this changes from the parameters that could be set, the port does a shut off / on automatically and of course logs the activity and sends an alert of some sort.

What do you think ...

[michael o'nan]

Only way I believe you are going to get this is running a layer 3 switch like 3750 or 3560 with IPServices software. Using Embedded Event Manager you could set it where if the port goes down it will run a shut/no shut command on the port.

[jsalvador]

"If the port goes down"  is that  saying if the port is not receiving the "pre -learned" activity it was seeing before or cannot detect pushing power to a device or the device not receiving power. ?

Are the 3750 and 3560 switches PoE ?

Thanks 

[michael o'nan]

Yes they can be PoE...They will be expensive unless you purchase used. You could do it based on a power event or link flap or anything else that would be tracked in the logs.

[jsalvador]

Thank you ...

[Joseph W. Doherty]

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Posting

As Michael has already noted, often Cisco devices support on-board scripting, so such might be configured to respond to certain events and/or run on a scheduled basis.

If on-board scripting doesn't do the trick, you could also consider external monitoring/scripting.  The latter might be easier to maintain.

One thing that might be an issue, a "down" camera might not actually take the port down.  If the situation is such that it just stops transmitting traffic, you could monitor for that.  If camera's port ingress traffic goes to zero, bouncing a PoE port will generally reload the device (which sounds like why it might be "fixing" the cameras").