List of the LLDP-compatible operating systems and information on software products
In principle, LLDP works on all popular systems, provided that LLDP agents or an appropriate software for evaluation of the LLDP packages is available. For Linux there are various open source projects, such as "LLDPD", "Open-LLDP" (with hyphen) or "ladvd", which deploy an LLDP agent.
The project "OpenLLDP" aims to achieve a further dissemination and acceptance of the LLDP protocol (802.1AB). The software supports the transmission and reception of LLDP messages on the Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, and NetBSD platforms. Currently, however, this development seems to be stalled.
Microsoft Windows Vista and Windows 7 contain a proprietary protocol called LLTD (Link Layer Topology Discovery), which is essentially the same functionality as LLDP. On Windows XP, the LLTD component can be installed later as a patch. However, the patch is limited compared to the features implemented in Vista and Windows 7 because the "LLTD Responder" only reports IPv4 addresses, and not IPv6 addresses.
If you want to install LLDP on Windows systems, you can use a shareware called "haneWIN LLDP Agent". Using this, LLDP works on all Windows systems as of Windows 2000, i.e., on both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.
The most widely used free software for evaluation and analysis is Wireshark. The basic version of Wireshark is free of charge and now well-established as a standard. The software supports a wide variety of operating systems and can read and evaluate a wide variety of protocols (including LLDP). However, the focus of the basic version of Wireshark is the analysis of problems within the network. If you need more features (such as the visualization of network traffic in the form of colored graphs), you can purchase add-on modules.
