Low traffic keepalive

[Deepmind]

Hi,

we've got a problem with some machines (printers, industrial devices, ...) that doesn't generate trafic except when they receive a request.

So they loose their vlan mobility and/or their 802.1x access and become unreachable.

We are currently using Nagios to ping these machines so they generate trafic, but we are not proud of it.

We tried to create a permanent entry in the mac-address table, but it isnt compatible with vlan mobility nor 802.1x.

Does an Alcatel integrated solution exists?
Maybe a keepalive protocol based on ICMP?
Maybe something I have not thought of?

Thanks

[devnull]

You can check with
"vlan port 1/X default vlan restore disable"

which keeps the learned vlan even when the mac ages out.

Please read cli-guide and do some test on your own.

[Deepmind]

Yes, but unfortunately if the switch reboots, it loose all his vlan/port associations and the silent machine is isolated.

An Alcatel guy told us to use "vlan x port y/z" which basicly has the same result but without the reboot issue:

Code: Select all

vlan 12 name printer
vlan 12 port 1/1-24
vlan 12 ip 10.0.12.0 255.255.255.0

We are not really happy with it, because for each vlan, we must think if it could contain silent machines.
"show vlan port" is also a little bit "polluted".

But it's not a bad solution, if it works, since i havent yet tested with 802.1x

i'll give you my results

[Deepmind]

We also found something into 6900's doc : SAA for Service Assurance Agent.

Basically it's a feature which ping a list of IPs to monitor RTTs, make summary and send traps on thresholds.
So it's the same trick as Nagios.

unfortunately:
this doesn't seems to be able to ping a subnet range (since it's for monitoring), so configuration will be boring and not flexible;
It's available on 6900, not 6450 ...;
And we fear it consume too much resources because of monitoring feature useless in our case.

we explored a lot of tracks