In our quest to find the world's best IP address management tool, IPControl 2.0 from International Network Services slipped under our radar. So we recently subjected IPControl to the same tests and criteria we used in our May 9 story.

The perfect IP address management tool should flexibly and efficiently assign IP addresses to all IP devices, centrally manage the address and URL information across an enterprise, quickly and effortlessly equate host names with IP addresses, scale well, be intuitive to use and be pervasively platform-neutral. The tool also must have useful reports, integrate with custom-written applications, cooperate with Active Directory, be LDAP-aware Lightweight Delivery Access Protocol-aware and deal robustly with badly formed or non-compliant DHCP requests. The best tool is also highly fault-tolerant and enforces security to help keep hackers at bay.

We found IPControl to be less expensive than Lucent Technologies' VitalQIP and MetaInfo's Meta IP, yet just as easy to use. However, VitalQIP (the May 9 Clear Choice Award winner) is faster, offers more features and is more scalable.

Organizing your addresses

IPControl did a good job of discovering and cataloging our network's devices via its queries of router subnets, DHCP address pools and individual IP addresses. After initially discovering our IP-based network nodes, IPControl separately managed actual vs. planned addressing schemes to provide us with a forward-looking view of our future network as it expanded. We also liked IPControl's BIND versions 8 and 9 compliance, as well as integration with Active Directory. IPControl can direct the operations of Windows Server's DHCP services just as well as it can its own DHCP server software.

The IPControl platform includes a central InControl Executive, at least one but possibly several InControl Agents, a central database and an Administrative Interface. The Executive application directs the activities of the agents, stores IP addressing information in the database and accepts interactive configuration data from the Administrative Interface. The default database is MySQL (included), but on Solaris you can substitute your own copy of Oracle's relational database. INS supplies ISC DHCP software that runs on Red Hat Linux and Solaris, and BIND software that runs on Windows, Red Hat Linux and Solaris. IPControl runs on Solaris, Windows (2000, 2003 and XP) and Red Hat Linux. If you prefer a network appliance, INS sells IPControl pre-loaded in a rack-mountable device.