You have been hired at ConnectSpree, a small, but growing Internet service provi

Question

You have been hired at ConnectSpree, a small, but growing Internet service provider. Your first goal is to learn about the network- that is, to determine its physical and logical topology, access methods, throughput rates, type of equipment, and the way this equipment is interconnected. You have not yet gained an access card that will let you into the secure telco rooms and equipment rooms, you do have permission to go on to the routers and switches.

What kind of network information can you glean from issuing commands on a router or switch?

What kind of information could you obtain from issuing commands on your workstation thats connected to this network?

what kind of information do you suppose would not be evident unless you could physically access the network hardware?

Explanation / Answer

It depends on the model of router and switch, but you can get quite a lot of data from e.g. BayStack such as routing tables, packet counts, ARP tables, filter entries, port characteristics, hardware status, firmware etc. So you can identify MAC addresses and ip address of equipment connected to the different ports, for instance From a workstation you could run e.g nmap which will tell you about devices live on the network, including often fingerprinting information (operating system and version), running servers (open ports) and firewall state. You can also interrogate many devices like printers using SNMP. Without physical access, you will not be able to tell the colour of the wire insulation or how long the cables are. You won't be able to tell how high off the floor a router is or which way it's facing.

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