North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Software or PHP/PERL scripts for simple network management?

  • From: Valdis . Kletnieks
  • Date: Tue Jun 19 14:07:37 2007

On Mon, 18 Jun 2007 21:18:06 BST, Leigh Porter said:
> Just out of interest, why are you looking at routing tables to find an 
> available subnet?

If your predecessor wasn't quite as careful documenting allocations, it can
be useful to see if your paperwork says a /28 is dark, but you're in fact
routing traffic for it down some customer's link.  Then you get to do two
things:  (a) check if there's any *return* traffic and (b) call the customer
and ask if *they* think it's dark or not.  Hilarity ensues for some combinations
of answers...

(And yes, I once had a co-worker looking for a free /24, found one that was
nice and empty except for smack dab in the middle, a route for a /28 that for
no apparent reason pointed at an unused but registered static IP of mine in the
middle of our modem pool space.  After some digging, we remembered that it was
a work-around for when I had 2 IBM RTs at home, that did SLIP and static
addresses, but not NAT or DHCP, so my home net had some routing workarounds
that never got taken down when I replaced the 2 RTs with one box that was happy
to accept whatever address PPP handed it)

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