topic Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers in Operating System - Linux

Not able to find out a physical location of servers

Sachin Jadhav — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 08:31:17 GMT

Dear All,

At my DC we are having 4 Linux servers 10.0.252.201/204/31/218.

Actually we are not able to login to these servers by using any login name. These are very old servers and causing Multicast traffic in the network. So we want to find out the physical location by finding out a MAC addresses of these servers.

Is there any possibility for the same because we don't have any other alternative to find out the physical location of the servers.

Please share your valuable views on the same.

Thanks in advance ....

Many Thanks,
Sachin Jadhav

Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers

Alexander Chuzhoy — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 09:47:05 GMT

Try the following:
1. ping these servers from the same subnet.
2. Find their MAC inthe ARP cache.
3. Login to switch(es) serving the subnet and see the mac addresses/port table.
4. The cable from the port (on which your MAC resides) goes into the socket in the wall - where the machine physically resides.
This should help.

Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers

Matti_Kurkela — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 12:51:10 GMT

The server does not know its physical location and usually does not care about it (other than locale/timezone settings).

If you cannot login to those servers, there is no way to e.g. make the servers beep or otherwise identify themselves. So the only available option is to "follow the cable" (the procedure outlined by Alexander).

*If* your servers have SNMP installed & enabled, the previous sysadmins have typed in location information to /etc/snmpd.conf *and* that information is still up to date, you might query their location information using "snmpget -c public -v 1 sysLocation.0" from some other Linux host in the same network segment. But that information might be severely out of date, so you must verify it anyway.

MK

Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers

Difladermaus — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:04:29 GMT

Another reason to use ILO on HP servers. Then you can log into that interface even is the system fails and blink the locator lights.

Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers

UVK — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:59:07 GMT

Do you have ILO configured? If yes you can see UID led which can be switched on. This is lit a LED on the server which you can locate in the DC.

Your NIC h/w address and IP will be logged in the switch it is connected. Talk to your network team and find out the switch port to trace your server by following the cable.

-uvk

Re: Not able to find out a physical location of servers

mohamed.bouraoui — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:25:03 GMT

ping and arp, that it.