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In my opinion, as a user AND a web developer, the ONLY truly acceptable use of flash is for games and intensively interactive media.

Not being a web developer, I cannot comment on that part but, as a user, I sometimes stumble upon sites that use Flash in interesting ways. Yes, that means I have to add NoScript exceptions to view the content but that's not too much of an inconvenience if I believe it is "safe".

One example is Blue Cat Networks.
Hover over the people, then try clicking some of them.

(No, I don't work there but I know a couple of people that do).

I've reviewed the following:

Bluecat Networks Proteus/Adonis http://www.bluecatnetworks.com/
Incognito IP/Name/DNS Commander http://www.incognito.com/
INS IPControl http://www.ins.com/
Carnegie Mellon's NetReg http://www.net.cmu.edu/netreg
Lucent VitalQIP http://qip.lucent.com/
Solarwinds IPAM Pro http://www.solarwinds.net/
Men & Mice http://www.menandmice.com/
Infoblox http://www.infoblox.com/
IPPlan http://freshmeat.net/projects/ipplan
MetaInfo http://www.metainfo.com/

In hopes of replacing our current in-house developed solution.

I'll be honest, they are for the most part simply 'ok'. I wasn't super-impressed with any of them, and the bottom half of the list were definitely not ready for ISP/ASP/MSP-level use. I've listed them in descending order of my preference. All the useable ones are super-expensive, on the order of 'ok you can afford to pay a decent php/mysql coder to code you something from the ground up', or you can take this out-of-the-box thing, and shoe-horn it into your existing network. Which will in most cases take some weeks of programming anyway...

I had some of what I thought were pretty simple requirements...

- unix/linux based
- no single point of failure (clustering)
- handle forward and reverse dns
- api's (mostly to allow us to present a customer access to their zones)
- web-based gui with tiered user-levels
- pref software-based install rather than appliance, due to the shoe-horn prediction i mentioned above

Those are the highlights off the top of my head. I was surprised how few actually had all those features.

After months of doing webcasts, reading white-papers etc we've come to the conclusion that it's going to be developed in-house from the ground up, using bsd/apache/postgres/php/bind and some soap.

After reviewing these, I'm actually dying to know what large enterprises are using. I'm hoping there's some magic bullet IPAM solution that I missed on google. Please someone tell me about it!

Anyway, hope this helps you in your quest.

If you really want to get fancy, and integrate your IP address space management with your DHCP and DNS, take a look at BlueCat Networks. They have a suite of tools, and the one you're looking for is called Proteus. Highly integrated DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management. It costs money, but it sounds like your shop can afford it. Best of luck.

If you really want to get fancy, and integrate your IP address space management with your DHCP and DNS, take a look at BlueCat Networks. They have a suite of tools, and the one you're looking for is called Proteus. Highly integrated DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management. It costs money, but it sounds like your shop can afford it. Best of luck.

I've found that Infoblox isn't at all cracked up to what they claim to be. From my experience, BlueCat Networks' Adonis DNS/DHCP server kicks ass over anything from Infoblox in ease of management and reliability. As well, BlueCat's technical support is the greatest I have ever dealt with.

BlueCat has another product called the Proteus that handles IP Address Management. We have found that with multiple locations distributed throughout the world, something like this may greatly help us keep a tighter control of our networks.

I'm not trying to knock Infoblox, I have happened to use both companies products in my carrer and prefer BlueCats better.

My company uses a spam appliance called Meridius. It's based on some proprietary technology and uses spam assassin as a second layer. It has a very slick interface and stops about 97% of spam. Oh and it's made by a Canadian company called BlueCat Networks.

For offices that don't want to install or manage spam assassin on individual clients workstations, nor bog down their existing servers you can run SpamAssassin as a content filter on your incoming mail relay. Info on a mail relay appliance that uses SpamAssassin can be found here