[HECnet] Cisco DECnet routers and NML

[Paul Koning]

> On May 4, 2020, at 3:58 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
> 
> On 2020-05-04 19:39, Paul Koning wrote:
>>> On May 4, 2020, at 1:35 AM, Tim Sneddon <tim at sneddon.id.au> wrote:
>>> 
>>> On Mon, May 4, 2020 at 1:57 AM Peter Lothberg <roll at stupi.com> wrote:
>>> The Cisco DECnet router implementation does not speak "decnet management" as
>>> we all knew. The way we are using them the tunnel end-points are on the Internet.
>>> 
>>> Most of the information "missing" is actually available through the SNMP MIB,
>>> so if we could agree on a common read-only community and publish the IP addresses
>>> of those routers it would be possible to complete Paul's map..
>>> 
>>> I would definitely be up for that. Maybe "hecnet-ro" for the community name?
>>> 
>>> Regards, Tim.
>> Nice idea.  I can certainly do this.  To make it work, the node database would have to list IP addresses for MIB access.
> 
> I could certainly extend it with that...
> 
>> The fact that the Cisco routers don't speak NICE isn't always a problem.  If they have neighbors that do I still get the information, since I will chart a circuit even if only one of the two sides tells me about it.
>> If there is a chain of Cisco routers, the one in the middle of the chain wouldn't be mapped.  But, for example, an area served by a Cisco area router would be, since the mapper will try to talk to the nodes in the area and ask them what their view of the neighborhood looks like.
> 
> Well, that's not entirely enough. This means there are some major links that are not visible. Yes, you can see that there are a Cisco box here, and a Cisco box there, but you cannot see that they are connected.

True, and that certainly is a good argument to do the change.  To make matters easy, it turns out there is an SNMP library for Python.

	paul