Jeremiah Kristal wrote:
Back in early '98 there was a rather limited discussion on the
availability (or lack) of software to manage IP allocations in a CIDR
world. The concensus at the time was that nothing really existed, other
than homebuilt products. Has anyone come out with a commerical or
non-commercial solution since then?
While working for a small ISP I thought about writing such software myself.
While analyzing what I might do with it, I realized I needed to interface
it to the customer database rather than have it run standalone. Since that
database hadn't been written/bought I didn't have any real direction to
proceed with.
Some of the specifications I came up with included the aility to have
customer service people request assignments and get numbers back quickly,
and have a restricted access pool assignment feature. Assignments needed to
be associated with the customer from then on so that the information was
obtained any time customer support or network operations needed it. It also
had to be indexed in such a way that a search on any address in the block
would yield the assignment and the customer. Interfaces might also be
needed for generating reports and automated network update scripts.
Basically I determined it really needed to be an integral part of the
customer database system.
The cost of such a thing should include the costs of entering and managing
the data. Having customer reps or sales reps entering the customer data is
already done with the customer database, so by integrating the IP address
allocation, you skip the step of someone in network engineering having to
re-enter the data. You skip the process delays of the work order going to
network engineering and having to wait and come back before customer setup
transmittal takes place. From a business cost perspective, it seems to me
that the big cost savings is in the integrated allocation feature.
Do you have any specs on such a thing?