HP Transcend Traffix Manager - Manual (Page 138)

138 A PPENDIX E: A UTOMATIC A TTRIBUTE A SSIGNMENT
By editing the user-defined attributes configuration file, you select which
programs are used to determine attributes for objects. You can use the
standard programs supplied, or you can create your own custom
programs.
There are two standard programs and one example program provided:
■ fileattrs — Assigns attributes to devices automatically, based
upon a configuration file containing comma-separated data which
you must provide. For example, use this file to assign a MAC address
to a specific network layer address. See
“Using the fileattrs Program”
on page 140 .
■ dblookup — Assigns attributes to devices automatically, based upon
the contents of a Microsoft Access database or a Microsoft Excel
spreadsheet. See
“Using the dblookup Program” on page 142 .
■ nbtlookup.exe — An example program which uses NetBios Status
messages to find out the names of users who are currently logged on
to the Windows system. The first argument is the name of the subnet
to which the request should be restricted (for example, home-subnet).
It creates two attributes: OS Type and User. OS Type is set to
Windows if the device responds to the NetBios message and User is
set to the NetBios user name, if there is one. You could set up a
grouping using the NL Type, OS Type and User attributes (in that order)
to see the traffic generated by a particular PC user. The code for this
example can be found in
<install dir>/examples/c/nbtlookup.
Contents of the
User-defined
Attributes
Configuration File This file can be viewed or edited by double clicking on Attribute Lookup
in the Traffix Control Panel.
Each line of the file represents an attribute lookup program which is run
when Traffix Manager is trying to discover attributes for a particular
object. This happens when a new device is discovered, or when you use
the Reload Attributes dialog box.
When Traffix Manager discovers attributes for a particular object, it runs
each of the programs in the user-defined attributes configuration file in
turn. By adding your own programs to this file or by removing existing
entries from the file you can control how attributes for devices are
determined.