System NeDi
Execute nedi.pl from the GUI.
The module can be used to perform the following tasks:
- By default the help is displayed, which reveals options and the output legend
- Definitions shows all available .def files, sysobjids are linked to Def-Editor
- Discover will actually find devices
- Services scans for certain open ports on given IP addresses and uses the answers for host identification
- Init drops and recreate the whole database, but does not remove any config files or RRDs
Double click in the output area to have it turn yellow and scroll down automatically. Do it again to turn this feature off.
Discover
This is NeDi's core. You can use this module to determine the best way to discover your network.
Once you've found the right options, copy the command above the output and put it in crontab via System-Files.
There are several approaches to discover a network. First the right method to use the sources needs to be found:
- Don't add any IPs to the seedlist and check "Protocol". This discovers the default gateway of the NeDi host and any neighbors via CDP or LLDP
- If you have firewalls or other "hurdles" separating your networks (not supporting CDP or LLDP), you need to add a seed for each island
- Use a static seedlist and don't use any discovery protocols
- Select "Address" from the Seed-selectbox and enter a single IP or range like 1.2.3,6,8.10-15
- Alternatively you can click
to select Devices with the 'all' option to discover all devices in the DB
- You can also use a query to only discover a subset and use crontab to parallelize the discoveries this way
- To find more "exotic" devices, add the vendor strings to ouidev in nedi.conf and check "OUI". Discover a router connected to those devices and they'll be queued
- You can use route tables as layer3 discovery by checking "Routes"
The behavior can be controlled with the following options:
- Select a Configuration option to back up device configurations to DB and the config folder
- Click
to skip interface info, 
to avoid graphs or 
to ignore nodes (any combination is possible, to speed up the discovery)
- Select "Version" to force using an SNMP version (only tested upon first discovery and the first one working is stored in DB)
- Check "Read" to re-test SNMP read access (useful to rediscover an existing device in conjunction with -V)
- Check "Write" to re-test SNMP write community strings (only tested upon first discovery, can be turned of via snmpwrite in nedi.conf)
- Check FQDN to use complete device names. Otherwise everything after a '.' is truncated as fqdn's can cause wrong links
- NeDi relies on unique device names. Check DevIP to use their IP addresses instead
- Select a command file from CLI-Send selectbox to have it executed on each discovered device (see System-Files for creating them)
DNS Names
- Select Address from the Seed-selectbox and enter a single IP or range like 1.2.3,6,8.10-15
- Check verbose to follow the progress of the name resolution
- Click Execute to resolve all names in that IP range
- The Network Population report in Reports-Networks leverages this information to show unused DNS records for example
Services
- Select Address from the Seed-selectbox and enter a single IP or range like 1.2.3,6,8.10-15
- Alternatively you can select Nodes and enter a query like oui ~ 'intel'
- Select Ping (1-3s timeout) to make sure an address is in use (TCP echo is used and may not work on some hosts)
- Check verbose to follow the progress of the host identification
- The 'id' option uses ssh, sendmail, http, https and netbios for host identification
- If used from CLI, additional ports can be checked like -sid,3128,5900
NeDi Help