[SOLVED] Need for a network mapping tool but within certain parameters

[Quanticriver]

Hi guys and girls

I just started a government ITjob
I mainly support smaller muncipalities that don't have a dedicated IT guy

They want me to come up with a tool and standard practise to map all the networks of those muncipalities
networks not being my speciality i figured you guys (and girls) might be able to help me out a bit

It has to adhere with the following standards:

We are only interested in networkinfrastructure for now, no deployment or stuff like that
(for now) it has to be free
It has to scan the network in real time (too many 3rd parties are involved, placing hosts,aps and what not)
show a visual map of the network

nice to haves but not mandatory

being able to manage it all from one place, like from my office

Suggestions welcome

 

[bill001g]

So you have a government job that you do not have the qualification for and you come to a forum to get it done but you get the paycheck.

Your requirements are way to vague to even suggest something. There are a lot of powerful network management software packages and many are free. The free ones though take a lot knowledge to setup.

Still that is not your main issue. If you do not have commercial grade equipment it will not have the feature you need. For example a simple consumer based non manged switch is completely transparent to the network. You can not tell if there are 3 8 port switch or 1 24 port switch. There is no way to tell which ports are active and what is connected to them.

So you first must have some idea what type of equipment you are going to monitor and then see if there is a tool that can collect information from it.

There are other hacker type tools that brute force scan for end devices but if properly installed the end device firewall will detect this tools as attacks and not respond.

 

[Quanticriver]

So you have a government job that you do not have the qualification for and you come to a forum to get it done but you get the paycheck.

Bit condescending aren't we?
I am doing first and second line support, they have a few guys that do the network stuff but they are understaffed, so they asked me, while I have some experience in networking, I have never tried to "map" a network

Regardless, thank you for your help so far, ill try to be more specific:

we would like to see the hosts in the network, and to be able to diversify said hosts, e.g. a server
ip and hostname would be nice too
and this should keep itself up to date

and be free (for now)

please let me know if you need additional info from me

 

[Ralston18]

Google "free network mapping software" and limit the search to the last year or so.

Then after getting a sense of the available options, filter the search to narrow the results.

Per @bill001g you may not have the equipment and structure in place to do a whole lot.

Very likely that you will need a test host on which to load and run trial versions.

Doing so will help you learn and get a sense of the options available, what is involved, and what meaningful results can be gotten. Especially with free versions.

And the learning curve can be steep:

"The free ones though take a lot knowledge to setup." again per @bill001g.

Establish what specific network information is most important to you and then determine what trade-offs may be necessary. You may find that to get anything truly useful, the paid version will be necessary.

Start a on a small network on which you can easily verify the results, identify/discover missing devices, and otherwise spot discrepancies. And likewise be aware of any network changes that are made; either by staff or rogue users.

 

[bill001g]

Almost any network I have seen gets most the simpler information you want from the domain server. From a security standpoint you really don't want anything on your network that has not authenticated with the doamin.

You will then get logs of what IP are assigned to each device and when since many people use the domain server for the DHCP server. You should see which users are using what machines.

Getting out of my area of expertise but I know things like group policy can even see the patch levels on apps that are installed.