LAN audit

[hansvb]

I am regular asked to perform LAN audits

What do you perform on a LAN audit ?

Mainly i check firmware versions

Location of racks and physical installation + patching => the spaghetti-ness of the rack

Get backup of configs

Check the topology of the network

Have a look at the possibilities for login, if the hardware is protected with a password other then default

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Identify all the hardware with firmware versions

figure out the physical topology and identify all inter-switch links

get utilisation stats for all these links (I use solarwinds)

rough survey of how many active ports there are

survey of VLANs and where they are extended to

survey of spanning-tree - configured? priorities set correctly?

survey of inter-VLAN routing, other routing static/dynamic

note any redundancy that's built-in

check all logs for recurring errors or interesting information

what monitoring is being done

where are the logs collected

security: logins using radius/AD?, telnet & http disabled?, DHCP-snooping?, loopprotect/edge-port/BPDU Protect on edge ports?, no untagged VLAN on any links? 

[hansvb]

thx vince

I see us using Solarwinds for monitoring, why not use HP's IMC ?

Do you have more visibility with the Solarwinds tools or just own choice

[Vince-Whirlwind]

Well, because I have Solarwinds Network Performance Monitor on my laptop, so the first thing I do is log onto the network switches, use LLDP neighbour to identify the true topology (as opposed to the diagram they've given me) then I fire up Solarwinds, feed in all the node IP addresses, and within 30 minutes I can see what their network is doing - performance and errors.

I have no idea if you can use IMC in this way, unless you are assuming your customer is going to have it already installed, which would be great for you in doing the audit, I guess.

I guess the way I see it - IMC is great for managing an HP network (mandatory, even), but auditing one is a different issue.