SUMMARY: ip address management

From: Mike Sampson (sampson@iex.com)
Date: Tue Feb 07 1995 - 06:51:11 CST


Hello, all

Sorry for the delay in the summary.

The responses I got to my post :

>I was hoping to get some ideas from y'all on how to go about setting up an
>"ip address recycling program" of sorts. Specifically, I am interested in
>how you are solving the problem of managing ip numbers in a largish network
>environment. We have 2 class C IP address ranges (over 500 total numbers)
>and are in need of a good method to track whether or not an assigned IP
>address is still in use so we can reassign it if it's free. We've
>experimented with repeated pinging of assigned addresses, but many of the
>machines on our net are not Sun UNIX boxes and get turned off or moved off
>site for varying periods of time so there's some possibility of accidentally
>reassigning an address and then having the original machine come back to
>life. Any help will be appreciated. Thanks.

came in 3 basic flavors :
1) assign a block of IP addresses to group managers and let them deal with it;
2) keep a database (either in the hosts file, or externally;
3) check out network management software.

I thought rather than include the entire list of responses I got, I'd detail
what we're doing (as it has something in common with #2 above) and see if
anyone wants to comment.

We used Microsoft Access to build a database containing IP addresses, the
type of machine it's on, MAC addresses, the machine user, etc. This is used
together with a PERL script I wrote which pings the entire network and sends
me the IP number of those machines which don't respond in a given time
(currently 30 days). The database is used to build our NISed hosts file and
to track IP numbers to a given machine. (Now if only I could get the &@^%
thing fully populated!)

These two together (along with the managerial authority to take back
addresses thad don't appear live within the given window) are hoped to be
sufficient to solve the problems we've been having. I appreciate all the
responses I got. Thanks.

Mike
________________________________
Mike Sampson
System Administrator
IEX Corporation
2425 N. Central, Suite 700
Richardson, Texas 75080
214-301-1343



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