Do theses "Custom Links" only work when connecting two routers together ?
or is it possible to connect other type of devices or even a device with a
subnet ?

I have a situation with some secondary addressing on a network with the
switches being in one subnet and the router (in fact a pair of firewalls)
in an other. The default gateway of the switches is the interface of the
firewall even if the subnet is different and the firewall has some static
routes to direct the traffic to the switches. (all this was done to
increase the security of the switches so that they don't have any ip
reachable from outside even if they are physically outside)
I tried creating a link between each of the switches and the pair of
firewalls but it doesn't seams to work .... any idea ?

Salutations, / Regards,

Francois Le Hir
Network Projects & Consulting Services
IBM Global Services
Phone: (514) 964 2145


                                                                           
             Jane Curry                                                    
             <jane.curry@skill                                             
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                                                                   Subject 
             04/07/2005 03:16          [nv-l] Custom Links in NetView      
             PM                        7.1.4 Fixpack 3                     
                                                                           
                                                                           
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                   nv-l                                                    
                                                                           
                                                                           




Greetings,
I put an append on a few days back with a throwaway comment about "no
real new functionality in Fixpack 3" - WRONG!

There is a feature called "Custom Links" which, I believe, has been
developed to help the new layer 2 visualisation in the new IBM Tivoli
Switch Analyzer V1.3.  This works very nicely regardless of whether you
have ITSA.

The idea is that if you have a part of your network that you have no
SNMP access to (like if you FM your network) then you can discover nodes
at the "far side" of your network with entries in the seedfile, but you
get 2 (or more)  disconnected parts of network.  Custom links allow you
to create a logical link or tunnel across an unmanaged region - it looks
similar to an unnumbered serial link and is represented by a dot-dash
line on the GUI, so you can tell which are manual links.

 The only issue is that the documentation is inconsistent between the NV
7.1.4 FP3 readme and the ITSA 1.3 Release Notes.

It seems to work fine but the NV 7.1.4 FP3 readme says to supply:
@link <ipaddress>:0:<ipaddress>:0    where the "0" is the ifIndex

The ITSA Release Notes say "both zeros are required".  I have found that
the ifIndex MUST be 0, otherwise the link isn't made.  Always use "0"
and it seems to work out what actual ifIndexs are necessary.  Also,
don't miss out the ":" in the middle as I did for quite some time!!
netmon -y picks up seedfile @link entries fine.  I find that I have to
demand poll the "far" end to get the connection added - polling the
"near" end didn't establish it.

Enjoy!
Jane

--
Tivoli Certified Consultant & Instructor
Skills 1st Limited, 2 Cedar Chase, Taplow, Bucks, SL6 0EU, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1628 782565
Copyright (c) 2005 Jane Curry <jane.curry AT skills-1st.co DOT uk>.  All rights
reserved.