IP Wars: Revenge of the $sth
So as some of you may or may not have heard me bitching, Invision's IP management scheme is roughly one step below "Write it all on a clipboard". It's electronic (which is good), but also brain-damaged (it things that 0.0.0.1/8 is a valid netmask, and doesn't care if you define overlapping networks).
Why do I care? Well, our CTO is about to go before the allocation gods in a very Oliver Twist way. Small and humble, he shall go before the great robed IP gods of ARIN with his rWhois in his hands, genuflect, and utter the fateful words "Please sir, I want some more?".
Invision's rWhois is managed by the aforementioned brain-damanged software. It believes we are using about 50% of our IP space. We believe we are using roughly 83%. ARIN says you must efficently utilize (their words) 80% of your IP space before they give you more.
If our CTO goes before the numbering gods, they will strike him down for the sin of having a broken rwhois server. And they would be right to do so. We are technically in violation of our reporting requirements, as the aforementioned broken software feeds the rwhois server, and the rwhois server does not like the way our data tastes.
Enter what I affectionately like to think of as CIMS 6.0 (Hereafter known as "Project Atlantis", the replacement for invision's AtlasIS) - the oft-pondered, never-realized porting of CIMS to run on an open-source database so it could be free in the wild. The Sybase trigger logic Mike John and Scott hacked together over many sleepless nights has been replaced by the Postgres CIDR type and one trigger (to prevent overlaps), and the purpose has been changed (rather than defining IP space for individual IP assignments to interfaces (systems), it defines IP space as netblocks assigned to clients), but the code is founded in the same great dog-loving tradition of the original. All of the magic is available for public destruction in the usual place (http://www.bsd-box.net/~mikeg/ipmgr/ for this project). It is populated with most of Invision's network data but this information is available to the general public via the rWhois system anyway.
There are other features, important ones like authentication, free space management, making the system swallow DNS and RDNS again (the original CIMS did this by knowing about every IP in the universe - I always felt that was inefficent, but it may wind up being the only way), and integrating it with Cisco NetFlow (bandwidth utilization information), however this is the foundation for what I originally intended to bring to Invision - automation.
There are also other systems at Invision that I would like to talk to (the inventory/asset tracker for one) once the initial reasons for building this system are taken care of.
Comments? Leave 'em.
Also if anyone has any good "Atlantis" pictures, I'm lookin' for a logo.
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