IPADDRESS  MANAGEMENT 

 The IP Address Management framework provides Service-IP association and configuration through a
 centralized application thus maximizing availability of services.

  

 

Why IP Address Management?

 

Linux provides a wide variety of server applications using the

network infrastructure. They will be using either TCP or UDP

as the transport protocols. Each services will have their own

mechanism to handle the IP addresses used and the TCP/UDP ports

utilized. There is no central repository to handle all the

application's IP address & Port associations and thereby creating

the following problems to the administrators/users

 

* Once the IP address of the system is changed, most of the

critical applications break unless each of the applications are

Reconfigured for the IP address change.

* The more the number of configuration files the more difficult

it will be to manage the applications.

* There will be multiple services competing for same TCP/UDP ports

making only one to successfully bind to a port.

* There is no central place to verify the health of the services.

There are numerous other issues related to this.

 

  

What is IP Address Management?

 

IP address management addresses the above issues mentioned by

* Giving a bird's eye view of the configuration of all the network

 Applications.

* Helping the administrator get the status of all the network

applications running on the server.

* Helping the administrator to reassign new IP addresses to

applications if they use specific IP addresses in their

configurations.

* The ability to resolve port conflicts and facilitate the

administrator to reassign the TCP/UDP ports for competing

applications and thereby making them running simultaneously.

 

  

What are the benefits/features of IP Address Management?

 

IP Address management provides a generic framework to address

the configuration related issues. Some of the benefits are

* Changes in the server IP addresses will have minimal impact

on applications

* Provides a framework to resolve port conflicts for applications

thereby eliminating the risks of some applications failing.

* Centralized place to view the network configurations for

all the applications and their status

* Enforce policies on the address configurations of the applications

giving priorities for critical applications, auto population of the

configurations if the services are using multiple ports,

* Support for DNS Names and  V4/V6 addresses simultaneously.

* Scheduling of the configuration changes to facilitate minimal

impact to customers.

* Associate application specific actions for IPaddress changes

thereby reducing the application downtime.

* Logging facility of the configuration changes and the application

status.

 

  

How IP Address Management Works?

 

IP address management maintains the configurations of all the

applications in a generic XML format. Through the XML interface

the application's configuration files are managed and

manipulated. Each application can specify their own mechanism

to populate the info to and fro the configuration files to the

XML format. IP address management framework engine in the

backend manipulate the XML files and the configurations can

be enforced on the configuration file through the pre specified

mechanism (perl scripts, shell scripts,  java etc )

 

  

What the different applications who can take advantage of this ?

 

Some of the applications that can take advantage of

IP Address management are

 

* Apache

* Samba

* Dhcp

* Squid

* Tftp

* Dns

* Openldap

* SMTP

* Ssh

* INND-internet news

* NNTP server

* IRCD-internet relay chat program server

* Distributed c/c++ compiler

* Other webservers

* Other application servers

* iFolder

* iPrint

* Cups