admin down ports that are in a "down" state

tgoyette

Anybody know of a way to have ports that have been in a "down" state for a defined period of time be "admin downed"?  For example...

Every Week my Server Farm switch is scanned for switch ports that have been down for 21 days. Any ports that are found that meet that criteria are then shut down.

rschroeder

I bet someone can script this out for you, but I'd suggest great Change Management and communications is the better solution.  Your server admins should be notifying you when they shut systems down or disconnect them. 

I monitor all server ports in NPM and get an alert when one loses link.  I query the associated systems analyst and ask if they know the port's down, and ask if it is planned.  Sometimes they don't know it's down, other times they neglected to notify the Network group that the server was either scheduled for a maintenance window, or was being retired.

Granted, it takes a change in work-flow or procedure, but the folks in Change Management and Data Center Administration were all over keeping track of this, and where I used to have hundreds of inactive server ports that were enabled, now there are none.  The added benefit is that we know all resilient server ports are up and working properly, in case of power or switch or NIC or cable failures.

My apologies--I know this isn't the script you wanted that wout automatically shut down the ports.  But when there are multiple ports in an active-active port-channel going to a server, and when Admins' don't notice when one goes down, you don't want to be the person who disabled it after 3 weeks, and then have everybody discover that happened when the other port goes down and the entire server's off line.

Best of luck!

Rick