jerenius / tahtoprobe

Tahtoprobe LLDPd

What is LLDP?

As described in Wikipedia the Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is a vendor-neutral link layer protocol used by network devices for advertising their identity, capabilities, and neighbors on a local area network based on IEEE 802 technology, principally wired Ethernet.

Most modern managed switches support LLDP, which makes it handy little helper when debugging mysterious network related problems.

Vision

I have been using managed switches when LLDP is needed. I happened to have a spear Raspberry PI 2 just sitting ducks and waiting for a purpose. I decided to make a LLDP probe using that RPI 2.

I had few requirements

• easy deployment
• simple
• zero configuration onsite (or very little configuration)

Tahtoprobe was born

From vision to reality I decided to use Balena for deployment. Balena is a neat tool for managing Linux devices. If you are not familiar with Balena, refer documents on Balena website.

Quick and dirty steps for using Tahtoprobe this tool are:

1. Clone Tahtoprobe repository from github
2. Create application in Balena
3. Add Balena as target (use git to do this, for syntax refer Balena website)
4. Configure PROBENAME fleet or device variable in Balena to set LLDP hostname
5. Make your modifications if needed and push your application to Balena
6. In about 15 minutes you shoud have your LLDP probe up and running and visible in switch LLDP Neigbors table

I might be adding more features in the future or I might not. Feel to your own version based on your needs.