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IP Allocation and Management?
jmw asks: "I work for a large[r] regional ISP in the midwest. In the past, and through several acquisitions, we've accumulated a substantial amount of IP space - non contiguous blocks from a /24 up to /19 or more, totaling several thousand IPs. With that many IP's, it's a fairly daunting task to manage, allocate and just keep track of what we have. I'm sure some of you are in, or have been in, similar situations... CVS has been used, but not standardized on.-More people would like to see a pretty web page or the like. For those of you in this situation, what have you done?"
I work for an ISP also that has quite a few customers throught the country...
:-)
There are multiple methods currently in use to help deal with the IP utilization scheme, but I think the two methods that we use on a per-city/regional basis would assist you the most...
One highly overlooked way of assisting with IP deligation is... DNS! Please, do yourself a favor, and complete full reverses and forwards for every ip you have.. If it's a subscriber IP, make sure the reverse has -sub- or some other method of knowing what that IP is utilized for.
In addition, if it's appropriate for your subscriber base, and you''re allowed, put something about where that ip space is being deployed also in the dns entry...
Something like this: aabbcc-westside-sub.(router interface).(domain) helps out greatly when troubleshooting ip problems, routing, etc because you don't need to do any additional checking to know where this IP space is (supposed to be) utilized.
In addition, don't forget to keep track, in a spreadsheet or database of some sort, where the ip range/block is deployed, and keep it updated when new ip's are deployed. Mark if the range is for dynamically assigned ip's (subscribers) or static IP's (special customers and/or head end equipment, router loopbacks, interfaces, etc). Stick to your assignment. Don't have multiple IP networks on the same wire if it can be avoided (unless you use Trunking of course)....
Hmmm.. Now that I think about it, it really isn't so simple, is it?
Meep Meep!
Expensive, but really nice and integrates with bind.
.. etc blah blah.
Full control
scheduling
web interface if you would like
batch
Designed to drop in a manage your BIND DNS servers.
Really really nice and worth the bucks
Among other software, there's FreeIPdb.
In the last month or two this subject has been discussed at least once on NANOG. You might also try searching the inet-access list archives at MARC
-Nathan
Care about freedom?
Become a card carrying member of the GOA.
Lucent's QIP has been around for 5 or 6 years and is pretty good for centrally managing address space. At a former employer we used it to manage a /8, a /24, and numerous RFC-1918 subnets for a network spanning a couple hundred sites in a few dozen countries. Runs on NT, W2K, HP-UX, AIX, and Solaris.
(Disclaimer: I am not now, nor have I ever been, affiliated with Lucent.)
Your first step may be to put everything into a postgresql database. It supports IPADDR (IPv4) and CIDR directly, support for IPv6 addresses is being added, and if necessary you can define your own types and functions.
/24 come from a /23, or a /22?), etc., but this is a good start.
The first table could be something as simple as (CIDR, customer), plus blank entries for the unallocated blocks. You'll eventually want a separate customer table, a new field that shows the parent block (did this
The benefits? You can access the database from anything - command line, MS Access (via ODBC), web pages (via Perl or JSP/JDBC), etc. It's easy to make complex queries, e.g., "show me all unassigned IP blocks adjacent to a block owned by this customer." (That particular query should actually be added as a stored procedure.)
The drawbacks? It's a SQL database, so if you (or your coworkers haven't used SQL before there's a learning curve). Finally, as others have pointed out it's easy for others to dogpile on your project - you need to be able to insist that you have something that works for you before adding in features that other groups want. Tell them it's better to wait a month (for you to finish) than for nobody to have anything (because the project is too big for your current staffing levels).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Check out FreeIPdb. It's a postgres backed db that's meant for this type of thing. Future versions are going to incorporate RWHOIS, SWIP and other.
You can also check out NorthStar. Same type of thing, but already has functionality to assign blocks to users (ie. delegate blocks to a manager or a customer).