As many of you know, I hosted a webcast on "Strategies for Optimizing WAN Management" last week. The webcast went well and I'll be posting some additional information on it once the recorded version is available and etc.
There were a lot of interesting questions that came out of the webcast so I thought I'd share some of the answers here in th blog.
Several people asked about IP Address Management tool so I'll start by enumerating some of the lessor known features of this application as well as detailing some of the features that were requested but haven't been built-in yet.
First, if you have multiple users that use the IP Address Management tool within our toolset, you can setup a common database located on a network share and that way all of you can work from the same database. This has saved me a lot of time when I've had different people managing different subnets but everyone needed to be able to view the complete address space. To enable this feature follow the instructions on page 114 of the manual (basically copy the IPDB to the target location and use 'File, Open, Browse" to access).
Another commonly unknown feature is that you can setup the tool to automatically, periodically export the results to an HTML file and then display this content within the Orion web console. Much more convenient than having to access the IP Address Management machine directly when you need to grab a free address for a static assignment.
One feature that was requested but not currently available is the ability to exclude specific IP addresses from the scans. In the case of the customer that requested the feature, when his IP Address Management application scans the addresses for their core infrastructure it sets off alarms and the security team gets a little excited. This is a great feature suggestion and I'm going to try to get it into a release within the next few months.
I think there's a lot more we could be doing on the IP Address Management front. Let me know if you agree and if you have any specific requirements/suggestions.
Flame on...Josh
One problem with the IP address management tool is that you have to make sure it continually runs all the time and it would be ideal if it would run as a service so you don't have to worry about keeping it continually running.
Is it in the docs to configure it so you can do automatic updates to HTML as this would be very useful for us?
Thanks
Jon,
I agree. I'm currently looking into some options to take this pain away.
Regarding the auto-publish, it's under "Settings", on the "Preferences" tab.
Josh
Wouldn't this make a nice Orion module?
I have found the most irksome item about IP Address Management is waiting for the scanner to come out of the idle state to access subnets for input; and waiting for it to complete the scanning process before continuing on to other tasks.
If these tasks/services could operate in the background transparent to the user, and in a compatible mode with other services that would be great.
I'm the only one with enough patience to use this tool.
I keep having to remind people that this is a tool, not a software suite.