The university where I work uses DHCP for the vast majority of our IP addressing needs. Workstations and the like.
However for servers we obviously use static IP addresses. The current method to figure out if an IP address is available works like this.
- Guess an IP in the data center range, or look for one that doesn't show on the spreadsheet created nightly from the managed switch
- ping it if it responds go back to step 1 if not procede to step 3
- nslookup on it and see if anyone else has named it
About 90% of the time this works fine, but it is labor intensive, and not perfect. Given 10 administrators and about 300 servers in the main data center, and another 50 or so servers in our secondary data center, it seems like there should be a solution.
For static IP addresses (printers, MFDs, the occasional workstation) in the workstation ranges Client Services uses ipplan. It seems to be missing a few things we'd like: logging of who claimed IPs; multiple logins, preferably with LDAP so we can use existing accounts; a user interface simple enough that when you have to use it only a half dozen times a year it is still easy.
How do you manage your Data Center IP addressing? Do you track it? Is there "the IP address guy"? A paper list on the wall? Some variant on what we're doing with the poke til you find one?
Best Answer
We use a copy of dokuwiki, with a page for each used subnet. Whenever anything is commissioned, it's updated, althought we're small enough that if it's not updated for something, we can probably work out who did it.