Over the past several weeks, the university that I work for has been upgrading their residential network. This process has involved pulling out all of the old switching equipment and replacing it with the brand new Enterasys K10 switches. Many days had been spent pulling out patch cables in all of the residence hall’s network closets. After installing the new switching hardware, a lot of time was spent repatching the closets and documenting which ports on the switch were connected to which jacks in each of the dorm rooms.

Documentation is a very important step in any IT project and this particular project was no different. Our first step in the documentation process involved writing down what jack was connected to what port as they were being connected to the switches.  An easy enough process but definitely not a perfect one, so we added a second step to verify the documentation in the first step. To do this I wrote a script and web application that would utilize the Cisco Discovery Protocol that Enterasys so kindly includes in their switches.

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is a Data Link Layer protocol developed by, you guessed it, Cisco. If enabled, the CDP packets can be transmitted on every port of the switch. These packets contain useful information including, but not limited to, Device ID, Port ID, IP address, and even Location. By default, the K-Series will transmit those packets once every minute.  For our project we set them to transmit every five seconds, so that the student employees that would be going room to room, would have to spend as little time as possible in each room.

I tried to find a decent Python module to capture the CDP packet but it proved to a major pain to find a module that would work with the version of Python I was using, so I decided to use Tshark, which is the command-line version of Wireshark.  It can be installed when you install Wireshark. I have the Python program open a tshark process with the display filters set to display only CDP packets and dies after 7 seconds.. The script captures the output of that process once it dies and parses it.  From the output, the script pulls out the Device ID, which is the base mac-address of the devices, and the port number. Once the script has collected that data, it opens a web browser and passes the data to the web application.

The web application is a simple set of php scripts with a MySQL back end. When the first page receives the data, it searches the MySQL database for the room where the jack is located for that particular port and chassis. If the room number is in correct, they can hit submit, if its wrong, they simply can change the room number in that field and click submit.  Any ports with incorrect locations were loaded in to a separate database table.

So far the other students have made it through two of the residence halls with no errors in the documentation, except for that of ports that were added after we had visited those closets.  Hopefully this verification process continues to go smoothly.

Every time someone would attempt to send me an IM on facebook, Firefox would go gray and stop responding for a moment. I have discovered the quickest way to solve this problem, is to delete the .mozilla folder in my user profile.

CAUTION: This will remove all settings, extensions, and bookmarks in firefox.

It has been an extremely long time since my last post. In fact, way too long… So here’s whats been going on.

First of all, I’ve had my wisdom stolen… Ok, not really, but I did have my Wisdom Teeth removed. It was a most interesting experience. I went to an oral surgeon and was put under. I didn’t even really I was falling a sleep. They had me on an IV to knock me out, and that’s exactly what it did, instantly. The next thing I knew, I was being woken up and moved to a different room. I had several odd reactions to the anesthesia. Every couple of hours, I would get really nauseated, hot, and start shaking. I was kind of scared. I was in pain for two weeks, and it was an awful pain. It surged up to my ears and they felt like they were on fire. But eventually I got over it, and now I just dealing with the two holes in the back of my mouth.

I have setup a programming forum on my website. It’s main goal is to help students and programmers a like. The only problem is, I can’t seem to get enough publicity to get it rolling. The forums can currently be accessed at http://www.rychannel.com/forums/programming . If you have any suggestions, I welcome them.

The last part of this post is Data Structures. It is my favorite class this semester and I am really learning a lot. What is a data structure you ask? According to Encyclopedia Britannica, In computer science, a data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. So far we’ve talked about lists, queues, and stacks. I find them extremely interesting, but currently we are working on tree’s and due to its need for recursion I find that I can not wrap my head around how they work. I get the theory, I just don’t understand the programming behind it.