CDP RSTP and MST Port Roles
Like CDP-L2-Topology, this is another really useful tool. Particularly because it makes information that can be cumbersome to gather on a switch by switch basis available immediately and graphically.
In essence, for a given VLAN in a per-VLAN spanning tree network (or MST instance in a Multiple Spanning Tree protocol network), it will graph the participating devices and identify their port roles.
For a given CDP capable device as the root / start node, it will present a list of configured VLANs / MST instances on that device for you to choose one, and then it will crawl through its CDP neighbours recursively to build up a L2 topology graph of your network for that VLAN / instance marking the port roles of the various devices.
This means you can easily see:
- links that are blocking traffic;
- links that are forwarding traffic;
- the RSTP / MST root node for that VLAN / instance.
The following image should illustrate this (with apologies for the necessary smudging):
As you can see:
- there are options to include or exclude non-participating nodes;
- ports can be colour coded for role or just green / red (forwarding / blocking);
- links themselves are colour coded.
You'll note that in this graph, and in the example from CDP-L2-Topology, that devices are clustered to locations. This is done via a function in this file which you should rewrite as appropriate for your own hostname naming scheme.
Then, configure the following option in application/configs/application.ini appropriately for your own class:
;; The class to use for custom utilites. You should extend this / create your own
utilsClass = 'NOCtools_Utils'