System components
The IP management system consists of three components:
- A program written in C (“ipman”) that runs on one “IP host server” per broadcast domain (currently for the provider there are two broadcast domains). Each IP host server will have all IP addresses not allocated to a customer bound to its network interface.
- A database that integrates with each instance of the above program, specifying the addresses under its jurisdiction and the corresponding authorized MAC addresses (ipman_db)
- A database that is the current center of IP address records management, which ipman will access to get the hostname corresponding to an IP address about which it is alerting the staff due to an address mismatch (ipmanage_ipplan). This database has not been created for this project; rather it has served as the core of the sponsor's IP address recordkeeping for some time.