Hello. I work at a small private school as a PC and network support engineer. I have a network engineer that I report to. He has tasked me to map which network plugs in our rooms go back to which port in our various switch closets. We have one wing of the buliding and one closet that need to have ports maped and labeled. I have seen him use our Dell Switches to see which machine names are generating traffic through which port. He will not show me how to log onto a switch and see this view. His direction is to use a line tracer and go back and forth between the room and the switch, essentially replicating the old switchboard of plugging cables back and forth until I find a match. Essentially, I need to go to each RJ-45 plug outlet in each room in a particular wing and label it with the communications closet number, which I know is A112, and then add which port it is on our Leviton / Dell switch. Is there any way to get this information and bypass going through the switch?

I'm not familiar with the Dell switches, but most managed switches will allow you to see the bridge table. Compare that with the destination PC's MAC Address and you will have which port it is plugged into. Keep in mind that if there is another switch or device inline, you may not be getting a true physical mapping, which it sounds like your boss is looking for.

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