* Netcordia Founder and CEO Terry Slattery discusses the importance of keeping an updated inventory of the devices on your network
Having an up-to-date record of the operating systems on your switches, routers and other network devices can come in handy when considering upgrades, but that type of information is absolutely essential if vendors such as Cisco, Juniper or Enterasys announce vulnerabilities.
Terry Slattery, Netcordia founder and CEO, for the past few months has been sharing technology tips with me (Tech Tip: Root bridge selection and Tech tips: Determining routing origins; avoiding HSRP errors) that he acquired over his 20 years of experience troubleshooting IP networks. Slattery has productized many of us tech tips into Netcordia’s NetMRI suite of network devices that install on a switch port or router interface to collect data such as CPU utilization, routing table information, virtual LAN activities, MAC addresses and port connections. The appliances are packaged with software that includes myriad best practices for troubleshooting and diagnosing problems on Cisco and other nets.
This week Slattery discusses the importance of keeping an updated inventory of the devices on your network as well as the most recent information on the operating systems running on the network. For one, you need to know the software on the devices if a vulnerability is announced and you must install patches. Secondly, you should keep such configuration information handy when considering upgrades. And lastly, Slattery explains there are “bugs that exhibit themselves when different versions of one vendor’s operating system are in use” simultaneously.
In essence, Slattery says, “Reducing the number of different operating systems on the same devices in the network makes for a more stable network.”
To collect operating system information from devices manually you first need to know all the devices in your network. Then you will need to connect to the device, run the command (in some cases it’s a simple “show version” command) and record the result, perhaps in a spreadsheet or existing database. Depending on the number of devices, this process can get very time-consuming, labor intensive and as Slattery describes “very boring.” And as with any redundant task, there is the potential for error if performed manually.
Using a product such as NetMRI to automate this discovery and data collection process could reduce efforts and increase the accuracy of results, Slattery says. NetMRI can automatically discover devices on the network, create an inventory of them, including an operating system summary with IP address and device name, according to Netcordia. Slattery explains that list is then “exportable” to other tools.
“NetMRI updates the IOS version in use by each device daily, making it easy to validate the progress of an upgrade rollout,” Slattery says.
