How to check with only a mac address

I have a dhcp network with approximately 150 hosts whose ip vary due to dhcp addressing. I do have a complete list of mac addresses that should be active on the network at any given time. I use Nagios to monitor my core network (spread out by geographic location) but haven’t been able to determine a way to use mac address to monitor clients inside each location. Any assistance is greatly appreciated.

First of all, if these hosts are using dhcp, then they aren’t worth monitoring. The customer will surely tell you when his disk is full, and if that does happen, will it shutdown production? I doubt it.

But servers will have static ip’s, and servers are what you should monitor since they can shutdown production.

Also, you want to monitor all of the switches, routers, ports on the switches, etc. But a customer’s pc that has dhcp? Sorry, I have no idea how to solve that problem.

make them all have a fdqn
then address each of them by their name instead of their ip (thishost.thatdomain.com)

Very unique situation :slight_smile: we operate in the hotel/resort market. Each of these hosts are stb’s tied into the tv in the room. In a lot of instances hotel maintenance will immediately bypass the stb via coax if the guest has any sort of problem. Then we are faced with going back through the rooms to determine why stb’s aren’t online and of course they can’t pay for our wonderful service if it’s bypassed. We have toyed with the idea of having each one use a static ip but the nightmare of having to know which ip goes with which stb which is in which room is one I’m trying to avoid especially since a lot of time we rely on the same hotel maintenance to replace stb’s as they go out. Thanks for the replies.

i don’t think the mac address is easier to determine than the IP… you should be able to reserve IPs for certain MAC adresses on you server. THis way you could use the IP address in nagios… or am i missing something? :slight_smile:

Luca

I’m not sure that i understand everything. Because you know the macadress, isn’t simple to set macadress to ip in the DHCP server? Then you don’t have to change anything on the stb’s and have “static” ipadresses to all your stb’s?

[quote=“luca”]i don’t think the mac address is easier to determine than the IP… you should be able to reserve IPs for certain MAC adresses on you server. THis way you could use the IP address in nagios… or am i missing something? :slight_smile:

Luca[/quote]

You are a genious. Great suggestion.