Address Management for Biggish Networks

01 October 2006

Karl Auer of Nullarbor Consulting spoke at AUUG2006 - The Conference for Unix, Linux and Open Source Professionals - held in Melbourne in October 2006. The following is a summary.

"This presentation describes how ETHZ, Switzerland's largest university, leverages its central repository of address and name information using DHCP, DNS and DDNS to implement a fully dynamic and largely automated address and name management system.

The bigger and more volatile your network, the more you stand to gain from automating address management. DHCP makes desktop and laptop configuration much simpler.

This is a huge saving for an organisation like ETHZ that installs thousands of machines every year, or where many machines, especially laptops, change networks every day.

But DHCP is just the bottom layer. Someone still has to manage the address spaces as the network changes. Addresses without names are not friendly, so name management is a big part of address management.

So centralise your addressing information. Internalise, evangelise and formalise that "dynamic is good". Resist the temptation to have static addresses or names except where absolutely necessary.

There are trade-offs, but dynamic address allocation, done properly, will save you huge amounts of time and money. If you are planning to go to IPv6, going dynamic now will save much pain later."

Please contact us if your business or organisation is interested in dynamic address management.

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