Hopefully this is the right forum for this type of question. This question is more geared towards network admin's. I am currently using the old fashioned excel spreadsheet to keep track of IP and Port assignment's whenever we setup a server in our data center. Curious what other options are out there that are either free or low cost to take up such a daunting and time consuming task. Basically looking for the following:

-More than one user able to work in updating IP and ports at time
-instantaneous updates to the document/sheet
-locking of fields when information is being updated.

Any info would be greatly appreciated.

there's ipplan for example, but i've never heard anything covering tcp / udp ports too... never heard anyone ask about this kinda thing before. on the less cheap side, i'm currently evaluating MetaIP and VitalQIP for my company...

You can use DHCP to assign static addresses to your servers, and DNS to define them. Similarly, the ports are typically defined in the firewall configuration.

You can create a script to collect the data from the configuration of the infrastructure (even throw the collected data up on a web page), which would be an automatic process and accurately reflect reality. Using a manually created spreadsheet to drive the configuration is backwards and error prone.

Unfortunately (I am embarrased to say) this is actually large hosting company. What you mention regarding DHCP would be a huge undertaking even if it was possible. The network team is basically dumping this into our plate and I need to find a more efficient way to keep track of IP's and Ports we assign to servers and switches.

I also need to add that although its mainly a UNIX/Linux environment there is a good amount of windows servers. I think the script you mention would probably benefit the one side only.

in your example here you're already duplicating the work.. define in dns, provide in dhcp (and that'd be a reserved IP, not a static IP)

i've been looking closer at ipplan this last 10 minutes and actually looks like it could really be pretty good. doesn't help on the port side though. but then that's really always going to be an arbitrary addition really, as you wouldn't assign or control ports centrally in any way really.

You are still thinking in terms of manual configuration. I've written scripts to manage over 50K network elements, so I'm quite familiar with issues of scale. Take your spreadsheet, and save the data to a CSV file. Create a small script to arp each address and obtain it's MAC, creating the DHCP assignments, DNS entries. If you already have a firewall and are forwarding ports, you can extract the data from the configuration file. If you have no firewall (being a hosting comapny), you can create a script to nmap each host and record the ports.

New hosts get added to the configuration files, existing hosts can migrate (actively, or through attrition). Ongoing management is of the standard configuration files, and the reports are aggregated from them. It's very doable, far from a huge undertaking. The nature of the host is immaterial, as nothing is being changed on the host unless you actively go through and reconfigure their networking.