How I can understand where the device with mac …:72:A7 is physically connected???
On switch1 or on switch2 ???
How can I tell where a mac address is physically connected?
Thanks.
Your pictures suggest that both switch1/ether14 and switch2/ether2 are connected to yet another switch device through which they both can see MAC addresses :72:A3, :72:A7, :B7:74 (unless the first four bytes actually differ which I guess you would have noticed).
Thanks a lot for the answer…
From the customer I have only 2 switches mikrotik CRS326-24G and all the devices are connected to them.
To balance the load I put half device on switch1 and the rest on switch2 …
I just double checked and I’m sure it’s the same mac address …: 72: A7, but I can not tell if it’s connected on sw1 or sw2 …
Is there a system to immediately understand if a device is physically connected to an interface?
Thank you.
No. You can only see that frames from a device with a given MAC address come in via a particular port, but whether the device is connected to that port directly or whether there are some swicthes/hubs between the two cannot be found out. If only a single MAC address is shown on a port, there is a good chance that the device is physically connected to it, but you cannot be 100 % sure even in that case: unmanaged switches do not have MAC addresses and if there are several devices behind an unmanaged switch but some of them didn’t communicate recently, their IP addresses may time out from the MAC host table.
But what I wrote yesterday wasn’t the only possible scenario. Actually, one of the switches can also see the devices via the other one. So if switch2/ether2 is connected to switch1, the :72:a7 device is connected via switch1/ether14; vice versa, if switch1/ether14 is connected to switch2, the :72:a7 device is connected via switch2/ether2.
Obvious: " If only a single MAC address is shown on a port, there is a good chance that the device is physically connected to it "…
Indeed, the problem is when multiple mac are shown on the same port.
Clear, in this case I have to go for logic and exclusion…traffic on interface…etc..etc..etc..
Thank you very much.
By.