IPAM advantages (was Re: MySQL BIND SDB)

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2010-11-16 at 11:16 -0800, Chris Buxton wrote:
> With a management solution, of course. :-)
> [...]
> The advantages include:
> 
> - Two admins with different ideas of how files should be named and
> laid out don't butt heads. The management solution makes the decision.
> - There is an audit trail showing who did what, so that when something
> goes wrong, the correct lesson can be learned.
> 
> Integration with DHCP and IP address management is often another benefit.

Other advantages:

- point and click, whatever the command-line weenies tell you, is more
comfortable and, for the most common operations, usually faster :-)

- a good IPAM has a permissions structure, so you can allow
lower-skilled people to make certain changes, or distribute the
management task.

- you avoid whole classes of typo and typo-like errors, such as
forgetting full-stops, misspelling "in-addr.arpa", putting in-addr.arpa
instead of ip6.arpa or vice versa, making a timeout "60000" instead of
"6000", missing nibbles out of an IPv6 $ORIGIN or PTR, writing the PTR
octets forwards instead of backwards in a PTR...

- you avoid most consistency errors, within a zone, between zones,
between views, between servers. You get the identical updates made
identically on all relevant servers, in all relevant views,
automatically.

- there are generally bulk insert/delete/update methods

- the tool looks after correctly stopping, starting, reloading etc, so
you don't accidentally blow away your dynamic updates or end up with a
stopped nameserver or failed zone load because the config was wrong and
you didn't notice.

- most IPAM tools do dynamic updates themselves, so you don't have to do
reloads all the time.

Regards, K.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)                   +61-2-64957160 (h)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer/                   +61-428-957160 (mob)

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