Discovery
Discovery

This Discovery tool is used to discover all the hosts in the subnet specified by the user, to collect information from each host discovered and to perform some management affairs.

Here, a subnet is represented as a segment.

Attention to users of Windows 2003 Servers: Discovery needs the SNMP service to be enabled; hence the ASWM installation program will create a special SNMP community "ASWM" for its SNMP service, so that the community will not disturb any existed communities. However, a newly-added community will be restricted and only localhost is accessible; thus this server cannot be found by default.

To solve this, users have to configure the security of SNMP service by themselves and add more IP addresses for that specific ASWM community. Please discuss this with system administrator.

Discovery Process

At first, the Discovery tool uses ping to discover all the live IP addresses in the subnet specified. Secondly, it will try to use SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to get information from each host. If there is a host cannot be accessed through SNMP, the Discovery tool will simply try to get its DNS (Domain Name System) name.


Fig. The Discovery is going to search for all hosts on a specific segment.

Information provided

The discovery tool will retrieve the following information from each host:

  • The IP address of the host.
  • Server Type: Currently we can support general server, NAS (Network Attachment Storage) server and Blade server.
  • OS Type: Currently we only support Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP and above and Linux 7.2/7.3/8.0 and above.
  • Host name.
  • ASWM Version: If there is ASWM installed on the host, its version number will be shown.
  • ASWM Port: If there is ASWM installed on the host, we will show its port number.
  • OS version.
The discovery progress is asynchronous and the Discovery tool will report the status of the discovery process to the user by showing the completed percentage and the starting time.


Fig. A typical segment that was searched by Discovery

Main Operations

You can take the following operations.

  • Add Segments: A new segment can be added by pushing the Add Segment button. Then you can see four little edit boxes. Fill them with the new segment's IP address. And you can choose the subnet mask bits in the combo box. After pushing the hook button, the new segment will be added and it will be automatically discovered. After successful adding segments, the segment will be set as the current active segment."
  • Delete Segments: The current selected segment can be deleted by pushing the Delete Segment button. A dialog box will pop up to confirm your operation. If you agree, the segment will be deleted and the first one of the left segments will be set as the current segment.
  • Refresh Segment: Pushing the refresh button the information of all the segments will be refreshed. We will rediscover them to get the most updated information.
  • Add an IP Address: You can manually add an IP address to the current segment by pushing Add IP button and filling the edit boxes with the new IP address. If the IP address does belong to the current segment, the Discovery tool will check it and deny you to add into current segment.
  • Delete an IP Address: You can manually delete one or more IP addresses from a segment by checking the check boxes on the left of each IP address you want delete and then pushing the Delete IP button to delete them. A dialog box will pop up to confirm your operation and if you choose Yes, the IP addresses checked will be deleted from the current segment.
  • Select All IP Addresses: By pushing the Select All button, you can select or unselect all of the IP addresses in the current segment.

Fig. Add a new segment for Discovery to search.

Fig. Add a new host by IP.