Scanning Stacked Switches

Dear JDisc Friends,

SNMP based devices such as network printers, switches and routers appear as “Unknown SNMP device” unless we have implemented support for them. Typically customers submit SNMP walks (a complete dump of SNMP information) and import the SNMP walk into one of our simulation tools. The simulator enables our developers to mock the device as if it would be part of our network. This really helps to implement and test support for new devices.

A customer recently submitted a bunch of new SNMP based devices and we thought: “Well, business as usual”. But some of the SNMP walks came from stacked switches. Stacking switches makes them appear like one big switch. Of course, that makes the switch management much easier, because you have to deal with only one instead of multiple switches. But they make JDisc’s life much more difficult. Customers are not only interested in information about the stacked switch itself. Of course, they need information such as serial number, model and brand for the switches that participate in the stack. Therefore, we decided to implement generic support for stacked switches:

• a stacked switch appears as a single device with the type “Stacked Switch”
• physical switches appear as attached devices to the stacked switch
• the stack that is belongs to is available for each physical switch

Scanning stacked switches often depends on vendor proprietary MIBs. Therefore, it is essentual that you are going to submit SNMP walks for stacked switches to our support mail address (support@jdisc.com). We will implement support for stacked switches as time permits. We have already started with some Allied Telesis switches and there are more to come.

See ya
Thomas