Network Troubleshooting Tool

There are many ways to do the same thing, but some ways are much more efficient. Sometimes being more efficient requires a bit of work up front, but saves you an invaluable amount of time later, especially in the middle of an emergency.

The ability to backup network router, switch and firewall configurations automatically not only saves time, but can help troubleshoot when there are many cooks in the kitchen, or even if there is just one forgetful chef. The idea is simple: have a resource that automatically periodically goes out to each device on the network and makes a copy of the configuration. Further, an automated report generated daily showing the difference in configurations, in case something has to be rolled back.

Did you know you can track down a device by its physical MAC address anywhere in the network? Normally it is a manual process that is time consuming, especially if you need to find many devices. Also, what happens if that device moves, but you've no record of where it was or what it was? What if it could be automated the listing of what device is plugged into each network port, in case in a day, week, month or so you need to be able to check back to that info?

What if you have a network you need to document, but little time to research where all the connections go? While all the data can be collected manually, what if there was a tool that you could give a starting network device and list of credentials, and it would map out the entire network for you.

AlterPoint's Network Authority Inventory (NAI) is a free tool that does all this, and more. It can be configured to do all these tasks. The management interface is web-based and very slick, to the point where any junior network administrator can get a much better handle on things and quickly get access to config backups and get reports of device ARP and MAC addresses that have been stored.

For a more seasoned network admin, this tool can be used to send one or dozens of commands to all network devices at one time. Need to add a command to hundreds of switches? Highlight the switches and type in the command and click Go, and it's as good as done. Highlight all the switches, click backup, and it's documented.

NAI runs on Windows, Ubuntu Linux, any other modern Linux distribution, Mac OS X, and even has VMWare images available.