User's Manual

104 CHAPTER 4: DISCOVERING THE NETWORK
Wireless clients clouds These are shown directly connected to a
Wireless access point on your map. They are used to indicate the number
of wireless clients connected to the access point.
WAN clouds These are shown on the map between the two end
points of a WAN link to indicate the type of a WAN link that 3Com
Network Director detected. This also enables you to apply operations
independently to each end of the WAN link. Refer to “
Using 3Com
Network Director On A Multi-Site Network” on page 681 for further
details.
The Discovery Process
– Rediscovery
When the first discovery operation is fully complete the information
3Com Network Director has obtained will be displayed on the map. You
can then instruct 3Com Network Director to perform additional
discoveries (rediscoveries). You may wish to do this because:
■ There are some additional subnets that you wish to see on your map
that either weren’t specified in the original discovery or didn’t exist on
your network at the time you performed the initial discovery.
■ Some new devices have been added to your existing subnets or some
of the existing devices have changed configuration. Many of the
administrative tools, such as Device Backup, Restore and Agent
Update rely on the device configuration information held by 3Com
Network Director in its map database being up to date. Consequently
it is a good idea to perform a rediscovery on subnets where you know
some of the devices have changed.
When you perform a rediscovery on existing subnets 3Com Network
Director will remember and reuse some of the options you specified on
the previous discovery, including the selected monitoring options,
additional community strings that you specified, the NCPs in your
network and the types of devices you want to discover.
When 3Com Network Director performs a second or additional discovery
it does not update your map as it progresses. It adds all the information it
acquires to a temporary database. This means that you can continue to
work with your current map until the new discovery completes, though
certain tasks are restricted. Although 3Com Network Director is
populating the temporary database with the new information, it does
obtain some parameters from the main, working database, for example
any community strings that were successfully determined for devices that
are subsequently being rediscovered.