IP Phones leverage these two protocols to find out the VLAN reserved for VoIP and other information. Devices will store the messages they receive in their CDP/LLDP table.īesides being used by network administrators to discover the topology, CDP and LLDP have another purpose.
FREE AUTO NETWORK TOPOLOGY MAPPER PATCH
Note that this excludes passive devices, such as hubs or patch panels. Therefore, any neighbor discovered with CDP or LLDP is directly connected to our device, no intermediary device in the middle. This is due to the purpose of these protocols: find out directly connected neighbors. This means that a switch receiving a CDP message won’t send it to anybody else, but will keep it for itself. Interestingly, neighbor discovery messages are not forwarded – not at Layer 2 nor at Layer 3.
FREE AUTO NETWORK TOPOLOGY MAPPER SOFTWARE
A device informs the others about its hostname, management IP address (in CDP), capabilities (is it a router, a switch, or what else?) and its software version.
In case you have missed them, we will have to wait for the next one. Instead, each device sends out always the same pieces of information periodically. These protocols are completely stateless, hence we don’t have any session establishment nor retransmission of lost packets. A device advertises information about itself and listens for information coming from others. Neighbor discovery protocols work with a simple yet powerful concept. In fact, CDP stands for Cisco Discovery Protocol while LLDP stands for Link-Layer Discovery protocol. CDP is a Cisco proprietary protocol, while LLDP is an open-standard protocol.
Both protocols do the same thing almost identically, with the major difference being the vendor. Some theory about CDP and LLDP What are CDP and LLDP?īoth CDP and LLDP are neighbor discovery protocols that can operate in an IEEE 802 environment (Ethernet). Typeīefore we dive into configuration and exploration, we should talk a little about how these protocols work. Therefore, get ready with a piece of paper. This means that you are going to draw switches and routers, and links interconnecting them. Moreover, you will also have to draw the topology of the network as we discover it. You are going to populate it as we advance with the discovery. Use the following columns: hostname, IP address(es), and Device Type (Switch or Router).
This is all the configuration we have to do. First, we are going to configure and tune both CDP (Cisco Discovery Protocol) and LLDP (Link-Layer Discovery Protocol) on the three switches we can see. We will work on these switches to tune CDP and LLDP behavior, then we will use telnet to explore the cloud. Besides the three switches, the rest of the network is hidden to be discovered.Īs you can see from the topology, we have three switches connected together, and one of them connected to the cloud.
0 kommentar(er)
