IP address mgmt. growing up

When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution needed to share stories, photos and other editorial content with 15 sister publications in the Cox Newspaper family, network engineer Layne Meier didn't look into updated WAN technologies, but worked with the other Cox Newspaper papers to make sure all were integrated into an existing IP address management system.

"Cox Newspapers has a WAN wherein all newspapers within the organization can share stories and photos with each other," Meier says. "We had an instance where Cox Corporate had upgraded its DNS servers to [Berkeley Internet Name Domain 8], and several papers were still running BIND 4 or Novell Netware BIND that was incompatible with the newer features found in BIND 8, so some sites couldn't access the content without a lot of hassle and delay, which just doesn't fly in the newspaper business."

By installing MetaInfo's IP address-management software on one server and using another server for DNS and DHCP software, he says he not only better secured remote locations but also made it possible for multiple sites to share content more easily. While local administrators manage the DNS and DHCP servers, staffers at other sites can pluck content from them, because the systems now align and the IP addresses sync up. And Meier gets the 50,000-foot view of all the locations via his MetaInfo interface.

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When the Atlanta Journal-Constitution needed to share stories, photos and other editorial content with 15 sister publications in the Cox Newspaper family, network engineer Layne Meier didn't look into updated WAN technologies, but worked with the other Cox Newspaper papers to make sure all were integrated into an existing IP address management system.

"Cox Newspapers has a WAN wherein all newspapers within the organization can share stories and photos with each other," Meier says. "We had an instance where Cox Corporate had upgraded its DNS servers to [Berkeley Internet Name Domain 8], and several papers were still running BIND 4 or Novell Netware BIND that was incompatible with the newer features found in BIND 8, so some sites couldn't access the content without a lot of hassle and delay, which just doesn't fly in the newspaper business."

By installing MetaInfo's IP address-management software on one server and using another server for DNS and DHCP software, he says he not only better secured remote locations but also made it possible for multiple sites to share content more easily. While local administrators manage the DNS and DHCP servers, staffers at other sites can pluck content from them, because the systems now align and the IP addresses sync up. And Meier gets the 50,000-foot view of all the locations via his MetaInfo interface.

"Every device needs an IP address in order to communicate, and you have to manage those efficiently to keep network services available," he says.

In fact, IP address management - long an IT task pushed to the back burner and typically performed disparately with free tools - is getting more attention at companies looking to better secure and manage their networks. For instance, DNS is the network function that translates domain names such as www.networkworld.com into an IP address like 65.214.57.165. If DNS doesn't work properly, a user won't gain access to the Web site, and that would become a perceived network failure.

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Vendors such as Blue Cat Networks, Cisco, eTelemetry, Infoblox, INS, Lucent, MetaInfo and Nortel offer products that promise to help customers maintain an inventory of the IP addresses in their network, virtual LANs (VLAN) and more. Using software installed on a server or bundled on an appliance, IP address-management products are designed to keep an up-to-date inventory of network addresses in use.

Some products simply serve as a repository for data that must be updated manually by network engineers, while other products are said to dynamically discover new devices, collect IP address information from them and make sure there is no duplication.

Products today also typically use BIND 9, a more secure version of the protocol that includes features to prevent security issues, such as DNS cache poisoning or viruses, from bringing down enterprise DNS and DHCP servers.

"It's an absolutely scary proposition that many folks in IT that would never think of using Microsoft Access [software for data sharing and collaboration included with the company's office suite of applications] as an enterprise database are using the version of DNS and DHCP that came free with Windows," says Daniel Golding, a senior analyst with the Burton Group.