Setting Up the IntraVUE Scanner to Scan the Local Network

Transcript

Welcome to this video, Scanner Setup for a Local Area Network. In this video, we will cover what the IntraVUE scanner does, using the controls in the Scanner tab, and how to add a local area network to be scanned. There are three important scanning functions to be done by the IntraVUE scanner. The first is pinging all of the devices in the scan range for discovery and to collect response data. The second is requesting SNMP bytes sent and received from those devices and their parent switches.

The third is to identify managed switches and collect data to determine the topology of the network of devices. Let's go to the Scanner tab, Configure, Scanner. In the Scan Settings section, there are SNMP global settings. The SNMP Configuration button manages the SNMP communities and versions to be used by IntraVUE. There are two defaults, version one public and version two public, both using all lowercase letters. In this particular case, there's an extra SNMP configuration called SAMI.

The dropdown settings default to Auto. Using Auto will try each defined setting in turn, and if successful, will save that setting for the device. You can change it to only use one particular setting if that's desired. The IntraVUE scanner requires all known devices, plus a quota of the undiscovered devices, typically about 20, to be pinged at least once per minute, and also have time in that minute to collect some SNMP data.

There are four scanner speeds which can be set: slow, medium, fast, and ultra. In the table, you can see that each speed has a delay between sending each ping request from 64 milliseconds at slow to one millisecond at ultra. The slow speed is adequate for about 200 devices, medium speed up to about 500, fast to about 800, and ultra beyond that to around 1,500. I only have a few devices, but I'm going to select medium anyway.

The Network Configuration section has a subsection for multiple networks to be scanned, and also a button to Admin Verify All Devices. You will need to be using this button periodically to make sure all your devices are admin verified. I'm going to click on Add Network. Each network consists of a top parent and one or more scan ranges. The top parent is a device which can provide to the IntraVUE scanner the MAC addresses of the devices within the scan ranges.

Each network added should have either the router's interface of that network entered as the top parent or the IP of the IntraVUE computer if it is inside the network. For this video, we are going to scan the local area network and use this computer's IP as the top parent. When I select Use Local Computer on a Windows IntraVUE, there will be a series of warnings about an issue involving ARP caches and old devices like PLC-5s.

The current software has a special Windows service which removes the ARP issues caused by these changes in Windows, but the warnings are still in the IntraVUE user interface. You'll see these messages multiple times, and I'm going to just click through them when they appear. So when I drop down the box, I can pick the network I want to scan, and the whole class C of that network is automatically entered for me, and if I need to make the scan range larger or smaller, I can edit the octets of the ending address.

If there are remote switches that connect devices in this network, click on Add Range, so they can be added as additional scan ranges of one or more devices. The scanner will discover them and be able to locate them on the correct ports. These switches must respond with their bridge map or MAC tables to be considered a valid managed switch. Note that by default, this is turned off on all new Cisco switches.

When done, click on the green Save and Scan Network, and click through the warnings, and then go to View the Topology, and wait for devices to be discovered. The next video will cover the initial discovery process and how the IntraVUE scanner works. Thank you for viewing this video.