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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?"

1 of 77 comments (clear)

  1. same boat by aichainz · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.