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IP Addressing Space Management Applications?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the a-/48-is-a-lot-of-numbers dept.

_RiZ_ asks: "I work for a medium sized company and we are looking for a solution to aid in managing the ever complex IP space in use throughout the growing enterprise. We currently use a full class B of public addresses as well as all RFC 1918 ranges. The idea came up to develop this application internally, however this has proven in the past to be more of a headache, especially if the original developer changes roles or moves on from our company. We have looked at IPplan, but have found this program is more intended for an ISP documenting customer ranges rather than an enterprise IT shop. We would like something which is database driven, intuitive to use, and preferably open source, although a good commercial solution is always a viable option. Does anyone have any suggestions?"

3 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. I don't get what the problem is... by MoralHazard · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe I'm dense, but what, exactly, is the problem the poster is trying to solve?

    Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.

    Plus, what does it mean to use "all" of the RFC1918 IP ranges? Does that mean they're using every IP in every range, or every prefix in every range, or does it just mean that they don't understand subnetting?

    1. Re:I don't get what the problem is... by dubl-u · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Why does this need any application more complex than a text file sitting on a file share, somewhere, for people to review or make changes as needed? That's what I do, and it seems to work OK.

      Another reasonable option is a Wiki. Many of them give built-in version control and have full text search. For organizing the data, you can use multiple pages. E.g., one page for the overall breakdown, linked to pages for each regional block, and then pages for each subnet.

      If you're reasonably regular with your formatting and naming, Wikis are also easy to use as sources for scripts.

  2. Nodes? by Ajehals · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Just how many addressed nodes are we talking about? And how many physical networks?

    I would probably start looking at this as a paper project and see if you can't rationalise your network address schemes somewhat, I've used and would recommend IPPlan generally, http://iptrack.sourceforge.net/ but I don't tend to manage networks in any meaningful way, I prefer the networks to manage themselves, getting initial configurations of DHCP and DNS schemas right and then scaling it all up, maintaining documentation of the general topology generally helps too, although actually tracking what IP address is assigned to what isn't generally all that important or at least not for more than about 10% of the addressed nodes (I reserve ranges for static addressing on servers and network devices that require them and issue them sequentially per device, everything else is dynamic).

    .However you seem to be talking about more than a few thousand hosts so it will presumably be a bit different, I've never though about scaling a LAN that I have managed beyond 3000 devices, and when looking at WAN its never been a problem to have multiple networks with the same address schemes interconnect, it just involved NAT at each gateway

    Just a quick one, if you are using all of the address allocation according to RFC1981 that would mean you have well in excess of 16 Million nodes, or you really need to look at how you have allocated subnets...