Hi everyone,
im sitting in a kind of mess and would need some pointers on where to start. So, i got hired to do networking work at a company. Network is kind of big, multiple locations interconnected, probably about 50 something switches, some 30 vlans. Now here is my problem, nothing seems to work as expected. The switches are mostly managed, but nothing much seems to be configured in terms of security, Qos, Routing or anything like that. Theres no firewalls and its not connected to the internet (thank god). No protocols are blocked. Most of the switches are connected via fibre to a stacked core-switch. Since this is a switched network, i would expect all devices in the same subnet and vlan to be able to ping eachother, right? Unfortunately, wrong! Depending on where I am plugged into the network (i.e. different switches) I get connected to a different set of ip addresses. From some points I might see all of the other switches (right now im only investigating mgmt vlan, I dont think im ready yet to see what the other vlans might be doing), while from some points i might only reach a hand full. On top, if I log in to the switches (ssl or web) and use the ping directly from that switch, I get yet another set of pingable ips and reachable devices.
Obviously, since the network was planned by some contractor 12 years ago and built by some other contractor about 10 years ago, they didnt even have a department responsible for keeping care of it. Also, not really anything other than cable plans exist, no documention of the network structure whatsoever.
So, if you could give me some pointers or ideas about where to start making sense of this huge, historically grown and intrinsically warren network, that would really be a huge help. I've started setting up a monitoring solutions, which I hope will give me some further insight into what is happening. You've got any ideas where the weird ping problems seem to stem from?
Thanks a bunch for helping me find light in this mess!
EDIT: mostly spelling
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