Network Troubleshooting Tools

Chapter 6. Device Discovery and Mapping

The earlier chapters in this book focused on collecting information on the smaller parts of a network, such as the configuration of an individual computer or the path between a pair of computers. Starting with this chapter, we will broaden our approach and look at tools more suited to collecting information on IP networks as a whole. The next three closely related chapters deal with managing and troubleshooting devices distributed throughout a network. This chapter focuses on device discovery and mapping. Additional techniques and tools for this purpose are presented in Chapter 7, once Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) has been introduced. Chapter 8 focuses on the collection of information on traffic patterns and device utilization throughout the network.

This chapter begins with a brief discussion of the relationship between network management and troubleshooting. This is followed by a discussion of ways to map out the IP addresses that are being used on your network and ways to find which IP addresses correspond to which hosts. This is followed by a description of ways to discover more information on these hosts based on the network services they support and other forensic information. The chapter briefly discusses scripting tools, then describes the network mapping and monitoring tool, tkined. The chapter concludes with a brief description of related tools for use with Microsoft Windows platforms.

Troubleshooting Versus Management ...