Arrest the Culprit!

Dear JDisc Friends,

I would like to share a pretty nice story that illustrates the value of having an up-to-date network documentation.

Recently one of our clients contacted us and he said: “Look, we have some device on the network that uses the same IP address as our Microsoft Exchange server!”. Of course, that causes trouble and affects the Microsoft Exchange server’s operation. The only thing he knew is the MAC address that has been recorded in the Exchange server’s event log. But the question is how to find the machine with the MAC address! You might check out the ARP caches of your routers in case you have access to them. However, the suspect migth be already offline and thus the entry might have been already deleted from the router’s ARP caches. Finding the device is not so easy without having an up-to-date network documentation. With JDisc Discovery, the client could create a custom report including all MAC addresses and then easily find the device with the suspicious MAC address.

This is just another example why an accurate network documentation is so important…

See ya!
Thomas