NOCtools and OSS_SNMP Get Support for Multiple Spanning Tree (MST) Protocol

NOCtools (a mixed bag collection of tools and utilities for NOC engineers) and OSS_SNMP (a PHP SNMP Library for People Who HATE SNMP, MIBs and OIDs) have just gotten support for Multiple Spanning Tree.

Specifically, OSS_SNMP has two new MIBS (Cisco’s original MST tree which has a lot of deprecated nodes – MIBS\Cisco\MST; and the newer IEEE tree – MIBS\Cisco\SMST). With these, we can, for example, get an array of [instanceID] => instanceName values from a switch by just coding:

$ciscosw = new \OSS_SNMP\SNMP( $ip, $community );
print_r( $ciscosw->useCisco_SMST()->instances() );

NOCtools has the more impressive use cases of these new features. Specifically (and just likes its RSTP/pvrspt functionality), it can:

  • Show MST port roles (root, designated, alternate, etc) for a given (or all) MST instance(s) – this is equivalent to the RSTP version;
  • From a given device, it can crawl all CDP neighbours and create a graph of all devices, their connecting ports and the MST roles of those ports. This is a really useful feature as it means you don’t need to log into multiple switches to get a handle on what links are blocking. See documentation and a sample diagram here.