North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Software or PHP/PERL scripts for simple network management?
On Tue, 19 Jun 2007, William Allen Simpson wrote: > > [email protected] wrote: > > Neither 'show ip route' or 'have a text file' scale beyond a hundred > > customers. > > > Hogwash. Used text file allocation for ~3,000 customers. After all, it > is *REQUIRED* to exist (for bind). You need *a* canonical place that is > authoritative for all others. Existing tools easily track commits. > > DNS should always reflect reality. Then automated tools will show human > readable information. Someday, it may even be authenticated (but I've > been beating that horse for a decade). I'm sick and tired of bad NS > data. I agree, DNS should *reflect* reality, but I think it is very much misguided to say that DNS should be the place to have canonical information (i.e. source of all data). Canonical data is in routing/forwarding tables on routers/switches. That's the operational reality. The amount of data that you need to track IP allocations just doesn't fit well into DNS - there's no place to store customer id/service id, the length of allocation (is this IP part of a /28? /29?), etc. So you'll have to have "canonical data" somewhere else anyway. > Yes, we used a separate database for billing, and maybe could have > automatically generated the text file. Didn't want the customer > service/billing folks to have access to network configuration.... ;-) > > Any time you have more than a single location for maintaining network > configuration data, or allow technicians to just slap a route into a > router on a whim, you are bound for future difficulties! > > And when the routing table doesn't match, withdraw the route, and fire > the miscreant that failed to properly maintain the allocation data! Unfortunately, I'll have to say again that this doesn't scale. :) -alex
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