North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Software or PHP/PERL scripts for simple network management?

  • From: Leigh Porter
  • Date: Tue Jun 19 19:54:22 2007

William Allen Simpson wrote:

Drew Weaver wrote:
Does anyone have a recommendation of any software products either commercial or freeware which will import the ip routing table from one of my routers/switches and display it in a sorted manner? We just need an easier distributed method than logging into our Black Diamond and typing sh iproute sorted every time we need to find an available subnet.

Wow, LOL!

The software product is called a "text editor".

Look at your list of assignments in your NS .arpa. file:
 1) Find a subnet that hasn't been assigned.
 2) Update the text file.
 3) Wait for it to propagate.
 4) Tell the customer.

The concomitant procedure for static host assignment is:
 1) Find a number that hasn't been assigned.
 2) Update the text file.
 3) Wait for it to propagate.
 4) Then, and only then, update the forward NS file(s).
 5) Tell the customer.

Of course, there is software that will automatically maintain the files,
and even send a signal to bind, but I've alway found them to be weak at
subnet management.  Text editor is the way to go -- using subversion for
"distributed" file management (that is, knowing who to blame for mangling
the assignment commit).

However Drew suffers because some idiots in his org fail to update the files correctly. I used to have the same problem when I took over ops at a small ISP. They were using the routing table to store assigned subnets trick. It was OK until a link died so a subnet dropped out of the routing table. They thought "Oh look spare space" and assigned it to somebody else.....

There are also a load of decent (not good) free IP address management systems available, some with built in DNS updaters.

I do not use these because they all drove me mad. Now I just have somebody else do it for me. It's worth it ;-)


--
Leigh