[ppml] IP Address Management Tools

[Michael.Dillon at radianz.com]

>You should go to www.visualware.com and look at their
>DesktopResponse and VisualPulse products.  The first will do what
>you are looking for.

I really did not intend my request to open the door for mindless vendors 
flogging their wares. These products have nothing whatsoever to do with IP 
address management.

To reiterate, John Lewis said this:

>It doesn't help that there seems to be no suitable tool for
>tracking IP utilization to the degree that ARIN applications 
>require...at least none that I've seen, and I've installed 
>and tested several of the free ones...and never got anywhere 
>trying to get info or a test drive out of a
>commercial one.

And I suggested the following because I would like the members to think 
about this and discuss it at the next members meeting.

I suggest that ARIN should provide such a tool in furtherance of
its purposes such as numbers 4, 5 and 8. You can read the full 
text of those numbered purposes at this URL:
http://www.arin.net/library/corp_docs/amend_june_19_1997.pdf

I would like to see a discussion of this on the agenda at the
next members meeting.

I envisage this tool as something which uses a proper
hierarchical data model for IP addresse, not a 
relational data model, and which uses an appropriate 
programming language which could be incorporated into
commercial software packages or adopted by enterprise IT
departments. That probably means a Java framework 
combined with Python for scripting glue.
http://www.jython.org

Some things which are definitely not appropriate are MySQL and
PERL. There are already several hack jobs that people have 
thrown together using PERL and MySQL but they don't do the 
job well enough, would never be adopted by
enterprise IT departments or commercial network management
packages. In addition, MySQL is a RELATIONAL database but 
IP address ranges are hierarchical in nature and are better 
suited to an object-oriented or a hierarchical database 
model. The intention is not to do another hack job
but to provide a reference implementation that other 
people will adopt and integrate into their larger systems.

--Michael Dillon