Hello Monks-

I have a perl application that speaks to racks of Sun servers via ssh. Each server has multiple Ethernet interfaces on different logical networks. We recommend to our customers how to setup these networks, but in the end, the customers can (and do) configure the networks any way they want.

My poor little script needs to map out how the user has actually setup the network connections on these servers, so it can choose the best way to route some fire-hose data from an application it may be asked to start to a pre-defined data collection point.

Does anything exist to help me do this?

Googling on "network mapping" gets me to a quagmire of network monitoring tools that seem to be way overkill for what I want here. I'm looking for something that I could use like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

use netMapper;

my $mapper=netMapper->new(qw(host1 host2 host3 ...));

if($mapper->badHosts) {
    warn "Can't contact hosts:" . $mapper->badHosts . "\n";
}

foreach my $host ($mapper->Hosts) {
    print "$host INFO:\n", Dumper($mapper->HostInfo($host)), "\n";
}

foreach my $network ($mapper->Networks) {
    print "$network INFO:\n", Dumper($mapper->NetInfo($network)), "\n"
+;
}
[download]

The data structures for host could contain "ifconfig" and "route" information like hostType, networkInterface, ipAddress, netMask, macAddr, interfaceSpeed, ..., defaultRoute, staticRoutes, ...

The data structures for network could contain things like hostList, routerList, ...

Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!

Thanks

-Craig