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Paulo Bu
Asked: 2011-02-16 21:46:47 +0800 CST

ip level network topology discovery

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that's it, is there a way to discover a network topology at level 3 or IP level, i mean, i want to build a program that maps the different networks that are reachable from mine and where the routers are. any ideas? thanks in advance ike

network-topology

2 Answers

  1. Well, you should look at tools like OpenNMS which do automated discovery of your network configuration and services. There's lots of other ones out there, that just came to mind.

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  2. you can use SNMP protocols to discover a lot of information on the network. A lot of tools free/commercial are already available for this. You mention you want to do this on your own so you have to look at the SNMP holy grail, I would start here

    http://www.net-snmp.org/

    You could do basic level 3 work with readily available libraries. I would like to mention that in case you want to discover topology of a network without having direct access to the devices then you are looking at neighbor discovery which can work at lower levels. For devices out of range to give you information there are proprietary methods and protocols and could be device specific. e.g. Cisco IP SLA.

    Instead of reinventing the wheel (unless that is exactly what you want to do) I would go with Phil's recommendation of OpenNMS. There are also others like NMap

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