Re: [Netdisco] Duplicate MAC Address Issues

[Mitch T. <rec...@gm...>]

First, let me I apologize for the delay in reply. I spent last week in
intensive firewall training, and really had no mind for any more
networking discussions by the end of each day of it.

The Suns are running telephony app servers, and are indeed designed
for an HA environment. They are also older boxes (it takes a good deal
of time to certify a hardware configuration with the software), and I must
salute your mad Sherlock Holmes skillz!

Per your question:

The Suns are set up so that one interface is connected to a port on one
switch with a second interface connected to the same port on a second
switch. What I see in Netdisco is two ip addresses shown for one
switchport, and no ip addresses on the corresponding  switch. It
looks something like this:

Switch one:
port 2/46        10.10.151.35
                     10.10.51.35 [shouldn't be here]
Switch two:
port 2/46         [nada, should be 10.10.51.35]

My Sun engineer is willing to commit acts of MAC-Fu to fix the problem
at the source, but these servers are mission critical 24/7/365, and I'm
wary of making changes on production systems just to get every i dotted
in Netdisco. The suggested modification to the query I'd generated works
well enough make it useful for what I need.

BTW, we actually have HA systems that are designed ab initio to have
pairs of interfaces sharing both the same MAC *and* IP addresses.
This might be a consideration for future versions of Netdisco.

Thanks for the help!


On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Brian De Wolf <br...@bl...> wrote:

> On Fri, 3 Feb 2012 13:09:43 -0600
> Mitch Todd <rec...@gm...> wrote:
>
> > After a little digging, I found that this issue was associated with
> > Sun servers. Our Sun guy says that Suns are shipped with all
> > interfaces set to the same MAC address. As far as I can tell, the
>
> That sounds like a very broken configuration to ship hardware with.
> None of the Sun hardware I've worked with has been like this, either.
> Some googling suggests that this did happen at some point, but I can't
> imagine it happening recently.
>
> > netdisco database is designed to use MAC addresses as a unique
> > identifier for nodes, which is causing the issue wherever the
> > duplicate MACs are found. Is there a workaround to this behavior? I'm
> > running netdisco 1.1.
>
> The MAC addresses are used as keys so it would be pretty hard to break
> this behavior without some substantial work.  To be honest, this is
> one of the more reliable assumptions in Netdisco, as non-unique MACs
> would completely break layer 2 (and should only really appear in HA
> setups and other networking funny business).
>
> > This is the query I'm running (btw, this_blows is an indicator of the
> > day I was having when I wrote it, not definitely not my opinion of
> > Netdisco!):
> >
>
> One big omission in your query is the active column.  Without
> considering this column, you're going to see all of the historical data
> mixed in with the current data.  If you move ports around
> semi-frequently, this would be why you see addresses on ports where
> they shouldn't be.
>
> Does the netdisco web interface show the mismatched IPs like in your
> query?
>