On Wed, 30 Jul 2008 11:53:38 +0800 "yongkai Jiang" jiangyk2007@gmail.com wrote:
hi all,
I am writing this letter to ask some questions about ipv6 support on MetaNAV. We are investigating into MetaNAV3.4 to manage ipv6 networks.
In MetaNAV3.4.0 release note, it says that the system supports ipv6 now. I am a new comer to MetaNAV and know little about SNMP and ipv6 at the moment. So I wonder what does it means by supporting ipv6? Does it means that it has full support on it? eg, can metanav discover an ipv6 device and query related information from it(cpu,load, etc.)? Does it auto-discover the topology in an ipv6 vlan? Can it deal with ipv6 addresses? ...
Hi Richard,
First off, I would like to point out that the software is called NAV (Network Administration Visualized), the website about the software is called MetaNAV.
IPv6 support in NAV 3.4 is constituted by the following:
* IPv6 addresses and prefix information is collected from routers.
* IPv6 neighboring caches from routers are collected and stored alongside IPv4 ARP data in NAV. This means that the machine tracker tool now also can search for IPv6 client addresses.
* IPv6 prefix allocations can be displayed in matrix fashion in the web interface, as previously possible with IPv4 address spaces.
NAV does not, however, support IPv6 communication with devices. I.e. you cannot add a device with an IPv6 address and expect NAV to be able to ping it or collect SNMP data from it.
We don't know of any network equipment that supports SNMP management over IPv6, which is why we haven't taken the time to ensure support for it. I don't think that adding support for this should be much work, though, if IPv6-manageable devices do become more common.
Since you mention discovery of IPv6 devices, I would like to add that NAV doesn't autodiscover the devices that comprise your network infrastructure. You need to manually add the IP addresses and SNMP communities of the devices you wish to monitor.
There is, however, a contrib tool (contrib/autodiscovery) that can scan your network and discover all devices that respond to a given SNMP community, adding these to NAV. I do not think this contrib tool supports IPv6, though.