Netinfo For Linux

Netinfo is a network information collector application.

In a switch based campus it is not easy to restrict users from using whatever IP address they want on their computers. It is common to know an IP address that causes problems but not to know the actual place of this IP in the campus.

Netinfo tries to locate each and every known IP address inside a campus. It uses SNMP to collect the information from routers, L2 and L3 switches. Currently it works only for Cisco devices. It is possible to extend it to support other vendors as long as they provide the required information with SNMP.

Cisco switches should have IOS 12.0 or greater. Older IOSes do not provide the required information.

Netinfo combines the collected data to provide the 'location' of every used IP and MAC addresses in the campus. Location means the network port of the nearest network device probed.

Netinfo is found to work reliably on a pretty large campus of about 2000 PCs and about 30 monitored network devices.