IPplan - IP address management and tracking

1.1. Copyright Information

This document is copyrighted (c) 2002 Richard E and is distributed under the terms of the Linux Documentation Project (LDP) license, stated below.

Unless otherwise stated, Linux HOWTO documents are copyrighted by their respective authors. Linux HOWTO documents may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, in any medium physical or electronic, as long as this copyright notice is retained on all copies. Commercial redistribution is allowed and encouraged; however, the author would like to be notified of any such distributions.

All translations, derivative works, or aggregate works incorporating any Linux HOWTO documents must be covered under this copyright notice. That is, you may not produce a derivative work from a HOWTO and impose additional restrictions on its distribution. Exceptions to these rules may be granted under certain conditions; please contact the Linux HOWTO coordinator at the address given below.

1.2. Disclaimer

No liability for the contents of this documents can be accepted. Use the concepts, examples and other content at your own risk. As this is a new edition of this document, there may be errors and inaccuracies, that may of course be damaging to your system. Proceed with caution, and although this is highly unlikely, the author(s) do not take any responsibility for that.

All copyrights are held by their by their respective owners, unless specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.

Naming of particular products or brands should not be seen as endorsements.

It is strongly recommended to make a backup of your system before major installation or upgrades and to backup at regular intervals.

1.3. New Versions

See the CHANGELOG file for more information.

1.4. Credits

Thanks to ValueHunt Inc. for the use of their layout class used for rendering all HTML pages.

Thanks to AdoDB for the use of their generic database abstraction class.

Thanks to Vex for their Visual Editor for XML used to generate the IPplan documentation.

Thanks to The PHP Layers Menu System for their menu system.

1.5. Feedback

Feedback is most certainly welcome for this document. Without your submissions and input, this document wouldn't exist. Please send your additions, comments and criticisms to the following email address : <ipplan@gmail.com>.

1.6. Translations

See the INSTALL and TRANSLATIONS files on how to enable multilingual support and how to do a translation to your own language. Doing a translation does not require any programming experience. Current languages supported are English, Bulgarian, French - Auto Translation, German - Auto Translation, Italian - Auto Translation, Norwegian - Auto Translation, Portuguese - Auto Translation and Spanish - Auto Translation.

Nickola Kolev for the Bulgarian translation - nikky at mnet.bg.

Conrado Pinto Rebessi for the Brazillian translation - conradopinto at yahoo.com.br

Tadashi Jokagi for the Japanese transalation - elf2000 at users.sourceforge.net

Vladimir Leshchenko for the Russian translation - worker at smtn.stavropol.ru

2.1. Databases

IPplan requires a working database installation. The following databases currently work:

• MySQL 3.23.15 or higher (preferred)

• PostgreSQL 7.1 or higher

• Oracle 9i or higher (SQL99)

• Microsoft SQL server (both 7 and 2000)

The following may work, but are untested - Sybase. In fact, any database that supports SQL99 compliant joins, in particular LEFT JOIN, should work. See limitations section below for more.

The web scripting language php 4.1 or higher must also be installed as a module in Apache (NOT as a cgi). Php must have the preferred database driver compiled in and enabled. See the respective web sites and installation documents for more detail. IPplan works just fine with a combination of the Apache web server and php on a Windows platform - just read the relevant installation instructions for Windows carefully.

IPplan is also known to work in a distributed, replicated MySQL environment with multiple database servers. See www.oreilly.com for more information.

2.2. Additional features

To enable SNMP support, you will require the ucd-snmp package installed and configured in your environment. This must also be activated in the php configuration. SNMP support is only required if you wish to read routing tables directly from routers.

3.1. Customization

IPplan is customizable in many ways. See the sections on templates, triggers and pollers. You can also extend the menu system to include your own custom menus for other systems at your site - see the config.php file for an example.

4.1. Screenshots

You can find some screen shots here.

5.1. Services company

As a services company your primary use of IPplan will be to manage individual IP address records and the address plan of one or more customers.

5.2. ISP

In ISP mode, you will assign blocks of IP address space to your customers. In this mode, you will not be concerned at all with individual IP address records and how the customer breaks down his assigned address space. When you operate as an ISP, you may also generate SWIP/registrar entries, which are only useful if you deal directly with ARIN or any other registrar. (SWIP is enabled in the config.php file, see ARIN tutorial for more details). All the relevant SWIP/registrar information is entered when the customer is created.

When using this mode, I suggest creating a dummy customer which holds all the allocated address space from your regional registrar (ARIN?) already broken up into the various blocks that you will eventually assign to your customers. All these blocks should be called "free" to allow them to be found using the "Find free" menu option. Once you are ready to assign a block, create a new customer with all the relevant SWIP/registrar information completed, go to your dummy customer and move a block of address space to the newly created customer, and finally generate a SWIP/registrar entry for the new block. In this mode areas and ranges are not too relevant except for the dummy customer (see concepts below). You may also need to create a template for your registrar in the templates directory. If you have done this, feel free to contribute it to IPplan.

6.1. Deployment strategy

So in a new installation, first create the areas, then create ranges adding them to areas, and finally create subnets. Searching is now a simple matter of selecting an area which will display all the ranges for the area, or selecting no area and simply selecting a range from the total list of ranges, or simply selecting a base network address.

Within a customer or autonomous system, no overlaps of address space is allowed. This follows standard IP addressing rules. You can have overlapping ranges/aggregates, but the default behaviour of ranges also prevents overlaps. This can be changed in the config.php file.

To handle challenges like NAT or other overlapping address space, you will be required to create multiple autonomous systems. See 'Searching' below how to see information across multiple autonomous systems.

6.2. Linking addresses

IP address records can be linked together. This allows one address or multiple addresses to reference another address or addresses. Using this feature allows for the referencing of NATed addresses or having a link to a loopback address of a device. Linking is done on the IP address details page by completing the "Linked address" field. Once the field is completed, you can follow the link. The link also appears on subnet summary pages.

You can also link many addresses in one go by choosing multiple addresses in the "Select multiple addresses to do a bulk change" window, then completing the "User" field as follows:

LNKx.x.x.x userinfo

The LNK identifier must be in uppercase, followed by exactly one valid IP address with no spaces, then followed by an optional space and user description. After the page is submitted, the embedded LNK will vanish.

If the destination record of a linked address does not exist, a record will automatically get created pointing back to the source address, but only if the destination subnet exists. This is to signal the "Find Next Free" address logic of the subnet that the destination address is used.

7.1. Admin user

Firstly you will need to create users and groups using the admin user defined in the config.php script. The admin user can only be used on the admin pages. Once you are done with the admin functions, you will be required to re-authenticate as one of the newly created users as soon as you access functions on the main index page.

7.2. Customer access

When a customer is created, a group must be assigned to the customer. This will be the customers admin group and all members of this group can create and delete both subnets, ranges, areas and individual IP address records for the customer.

When the subnet is created, the creator will choose a subnet admin group.

7.3. Subnet access

The users assigned to the group that has subnet access can only modify individual IP records for that subnet.

Initially I would create three groups, one group that can create customers, one group that can create subnets, areas and ranges, and another group which can only modify individual IP records. Normally in large networks the people that modify IP records are not the same people that administer routers and configure the IP address space.

If a group is set to see only a particular customer, the same group needs to be used for all operations for the customer. The side effect to this is that the users assigned to the group have full access to the customer and can make any changes to the customers data, including creating and deletion of subnets. This is not ideal and will be changed in future.

Groups can be created that prevent certain users from changing an administrator defined number of reserved addresses at the start of a subnet.

7.4. Group authority boundaries

Areas of responsibility can be assigned to a group, thus limiting what address space a group can create networks in. The default behavior allows administration anywhere. Care should be taken when using this feature as changing the boundaries at a later stage may orphan some parts of the database and yield data inaccessible.

If a user belongs to multiple groups and one of the groups does not have boundaries defined, then the user is granted all access. Thus boundaries are a sum of all the boundaries the user belongs to.

Bounds are also useful to create users that only have read access to the IPplan information. Select the "Read Only" option when creating a new group.

10.1. Handling exported zones

The zone files are created in the directory specified by the DNSEXPORTPATH variable in the config.php file. The files are in XML format and are created when a user hits the Export option either on the DNS page or Reverse zone page. The files have a format of zone_ or revzone_ followed by the zone name followed by a trailing unique identifier, which is operating system dependent. The file has a .xml extension.

If a template is attached to the forward zone, the template fields will also appear in the exported XML file with tag names the same as the template field names.

These files must be processed using a XML stylesheet processor into a format suitable for your DNS server, and then placed into the correct location and activated by your DNS server. This is beyond the scope of IPplan and will require custom scripts for your installation. Contributions are welcome.

Sample procedure:

You will require a script for your environment that periodically runs to check for new zone files that have been added to the output directory. You will probably use cron to do this. Once your script finds a file, you can extract the file paths saved in IPplan using a simple grep:

grep -A 1 '<primary>' /tmp/revzone_FS9mEU|grep -v '<primary>'

This gives me the primary file path. Once you have the destination path, process the file and copy the output by whatever means your environment uses to the target DNS server. I would suggest using scp with a public key on the remote server to prevent having to type in user id's and passwords during the copy process.

Processing the file:

A sample XSLT stylesheet can be found in the contrib directory to transform the forward zone XML (files starting with zone_) into a bind8 or higher compatible zone file. I use xsltproc from the libxslt package ( http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/) which should be installed on most modern linux systems. A different stylesheet (.xsl file) will be required for each DNS server system that you use - I have no intention of writing style sheets for all the various DNS servers out there, but you are more than welcome to send me style sheets for different DNS servers to be included with IPplan.

A sample command is:

xsltproc bind9_zone.xsl zone_

For sample XML input of:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<zone domain="test.com">
<soa serialdate="20040626" serialnum="04" ttl="21600" retry="3600" refresh="86400" expire="604800" minimumttl="21600" email="" />
<record><NS><iphostname>ns1.example.com</iphostname></NS></record>
<record><NS><iphostname>ns2.example.com</iphostname></NS></record>
<record><NS><iphostname>ns3.example.com</iphostname></NS></record>
<record><NS><iphostname>ns4.example.com</iphostname></NS></record>
<record><A><host>myhost</host><iphostname>10.10.10.1</iphostname></A></record>
<record><CNAME><host>myhost-alias</host><iphostname>myhost</iphostname></CNAME></record>
<record><MX><host></host><iphostname>mailhost</iphostname></MX></record>
</zone>

Generating output as follows:

$ORIGIN test.com.
$TTL 86400
@       IN      SOA     test.com.       dnsadmin.test.com. (
                        2004062604 ; serial
                        21600      ; refresh
                        3600       ; retry
                        604800     ; expire
                        21600 )    ; minimum TTL
 
        IN      NS      ns1.example.com.
        IN      NS      ns2.example.com.
        IN      NS      ns3.example.com.
        IN      NS      ns4.example.com.
myhost  IN      A       10.10.10.1
myhost-alias    IN      CNAME   myhost
        IN      MX      10      mailhost

10.2. Automatic updating of zone records

IP subnet records (which equate to zone PTR records) and forward zone A records will automatically get syncronised and updated provided a number of criteria are fulfilled.

If a DNS A record is created or updated, and there is exactly one A record across all the customers zones matching one IP subnet record, then the IP record hostname field will be updated with the A record hostname field.

If an IP record hostname field is updated, then the zone A record field will be updated if there is exactly one A record matching the IP record across all the customers zones.

If an IP record hostname field is updated and a matching A record cannot be found, then an A record will automatically be created in the matching domain provided there is only one matching domain. This will only happen if the DNSAUTOCREATE setting is TRUE in config.php.

Under all the above conditions a warning message will be displayed stating that an update occured. The appropriate log entries will be made and triggers will fire.

12.1. Searching for individual address details

Searching can also be done on individual addresses using the 'Match any IP address in subnet' option of the 'Display subnet information' option. This is useful for finding which networks, either for a single customer, or for all customers an IP address belongs to. Using this option makes it easy to find the offending network in a complaint situation if you are an ISP.

If matching by IP address, you will automatically jump to the IP address edit page if the search is unique and matches only one subnet from one customer. If you use the 'All' customer you will need to click on the relevant customer network you wish to work with.

12.2. Searching areas and ranges

You can also create areas and ranges to search across only certain address space ranges. Areas are containers for ranges. Selecting an area that has ranges attached will search only in those ranges. Select an area and not selecting a range will search across all the ranges in the area.

Depending on what settings have been selected in the config.php file, ranges may either never overlap (the default), have overlaps within an area only, or overlap in anyway, including having duplicate ranges.

Areas with no attached ranges will not display in the "Area" selection list until ranges are added to the area. Areas with no ranges yeild no search results.

14.1. TAB delimited data

Network definitions or individual ip records can be imported in TAB delimited format.

The order of columns for network definitions or subnet descriptions are (three columns required): The first column contains the IP base address, the second the description and the third the mask either in dotted decimal format or in bit format.

The order of columns for importing IP records should be (six columns required): The first column contains the IP address, the second the user, the third the location, the fourth the description, the fifth the hostname and the sixth the telephone number.

If you have more than six columns, the remaining columns will be entered into the user defined fields specified in the template. The order will be the order the fields are defined in the XML template file.

14.2. Importing using NMAP

A typical application for this would be to obtain data for networks that there are no records for. NMAP would be used to obtain the host info of all the addresses that are active on the network. Once this is done, the data can be read into IPplan. The NMAP parameters required by IPplan to generate a valid import file are:

 -sP -oX output.xml

To speed up the process, you can add -n to not resolve host names. The import process also understands the -O operating system detection parameter. To use -O, you will need to drop the -sP parameter. Using -O increases scanning time significantly.

As of version 3.93 of nmap, the -sP option also returns the MAC address which will be recorded in the MAC address field of the subnet IP record. MAC addresses only appear if the scan was done using root user - thus the MAC address will not appear if nmap was executed through php and the webserver. You can set the S bit on the nmap binary, but this is not advised due to security concerns.

15.1. Customer, Subnet, DNS and IP address templates

The administrator can define a custom template in IPplan to allow the addition of as many custom fields to the customer, subnet, DNS forward zones and ip address record pages as the administrator wishes. This functionality allows flexibility in the way data is added to the database. Some uses for these templates include tracking asset information or WAN circuit information, the management of DHCP address space, dealing with additional and ever changing registrar requirements.

As mentioned there are different template files for the customer, subnet, DNS and IP address pages. The template for each of these pages has a different name:

Customer pages - custtemplate.xml

Subnet pages - basetemplate.xml

DNS forward zones - fwdzonetemplate.xml

IP address pages - iptemplate.xml

IP address pages (network address) - iptemplate-network.xml

A sample template called iptemplate.xml.sample can be found in the /ipplan/templates/display directory.

If a template called called iptemplate-network.xml exists, then this template will be used for network addresses (the first address of the subnet). This is useful to define subnet wide information like VLAN id's, telco line numbers, router configurations etc. If the iptemplate-network.xml does not exist, then the iptemplate.xml template will be used for network addresses.

The above templates are generic and act across all customers, and thus all fields are the same for all customers. Unique templates can be created per customer by adding the customer id to the template name. To obtain the customer id (a number), use the Admin/Maintenance function within IPplan. To create a unique IP address template for customer id 25, place a template file called iptemplate-25.xml in the /ipplan/templates/display directory. This template will override the default template for customer 25 only.

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15.1.1. Format of Customer, Subnet and IP address template files

The templates are well formed XML files with a .xml extension and should be stored in the /ipplan/templates/display directory. You should use the xmllint tool to test the XML file before using it with IPplan - no errors should be returned.

The standard iptemplate.xml file adds a free form text field to all the ip address record pages and has this definition:

<?xml version="1.0" ?> <TEMPLATE> <FIELD> <DEFINITION NAME="info" DESCRIP="Additional information" TYPE="T" MAXLENGTH="10000" SIZE="80" ROWS="10" REGEX="" ERRMSG="Invalid field: Additional information" /> </FIELD> </TEMPLATE>

A field definition to add a select drop down list:

<FIELD> <DEFINITION NAME="select" TYPE="S" DESCRIP="This is select list with two options" DEFAULT="2"> <SELECT OPTION="Option 1" VAL="1" /> <SELECT OPTION="Option 2" VAL="2" /> </DEFINITION> </FIELD>

The template file must be surrounded with <TEMPLATE> statements. Note that XML tags are case sensitive and must match as per the example. Each field is contained in a <FIELD></FIELD> statement. Each field must have exactly one <DEFINITION> line. Any line with an error will be silently ignore! The following are valid for a definition:

NAME

This is the field name used internally to track the names of the variables. Can contain letters and numbers only - no spaces or anything else.

DESCRIP

This is the description that will be displayed above the field.

TYPE

This is the type of the field. C for a character field and T for a memo or multi-line field, S for a select drop down list.

DEFAULT

The default value for the field the first time the field is completed.

MAXLENGTH

This is the maximum number of characters a field can consist of.

SIZE

This is the display length of the field on the screen - if SIZE is less than MAXLENGTH, the field will scroll. SIZE may not be more than MAXLENGTH.

ROWS

This is the number of rows to display on the screen - only valid for text or multi-line fields.

REGEX

This is a regular expression to test validity of the entered information. To test a field, use ^ and $ to signify the start and end of the field, so something like

^[a-zA-Z0-9]$

ensures that the field only contains numbers and letters. See http://regexlib.com/ for more on regular expressions.

Regular expressions are PERL compatible and use a / character as the delimiter, thus if you want to match on a /, you will need to escape the /. So to match a letter, / and a number, this is the expression

^[a-zA-Z\/0-9]$

Regular expression | can be used for multiple matches. Thus the following will match a field or a blank entry

^[a-zA-Z\/0-9]$|^$

ERRMSG

This is the error message that is displayed if the regular expression match fails.

Default template:

The default template contains one field which is the "Additional information" field of older versions of IPplan. If you do not want this field, change the template or delete the template entirely.

Template rules:

If you delete the template all fields will vanish and cannot be accessed. IP records that have been completed with fields from a template will not be lost, but records that do not have template fields cannot have template fields added until the template is either restored or similar fields are added.

Deleting fields from a template results in existing fields in the database with template data using a default field definition. The data is not lost. It is not a good idea to modify or change the template on a production system. Plan the template fields carefully before implementing.

15.2. Registrar templates

Templates for sending information to registrars should be well formed XML stylesheets. See the existing templates in the /ipplan/templates directory for examples. Currently only the

<xsl:value-of select="variable"/>

tag is understood and all other XML tags are stripped, thus only variable substitution is done. This is to prevent requiring the XSLT php library to be compiled in. In future XML stylesheets will be supported in full.

There are a number of special variables available during the registrar output process which are defined in the config.php file:

source      -> the REGISTRY config setting
maint       -> the MAINTAINERID config setting
regid       -> the REGID config setting
password    -> the REGPASS config setting
date        -> todays date in UTC format

in addition to the standard customer page variables:

ntsnum      -> starting of IP address range
ntenum      -> end of IP address range
ntname      -> network name as defined in the
               subnet description field
DNS:
hname1      -> DNS hostname 1
ipaddr1     -> Primary DNS server
hname2      -> DNS hostname 2
ipaddr2     -> Secondary DNS server
hname3      -> DNS hostname 3
ipaddr3     -> Third DNS server
   .
   .
   .
hname10     -> DNS hostname 10
ipaddr10    -> Thenth DNS server

Contact:
org         -> Organization
street      -> Street
city        -> City
state       -> State
zipcode     -> Zip code/Postal code
country     -> Two letter country code

Technical contact:
nichandl    -> Nickname/handle
lname       -> Lastname
fname       -> Firstname
mname       -> Middle name
torg        -> Organization
tstreet     -> Street
tcity       -> City
tstate      -> State
tzipcode    -> Zip code/Postal code
tcntry      -> Two letter country code
phne        -> Phone number
mbox        -> Email address

Plus any variables defined in a customer template (custtemplate.xml) and also the subnet template (basetemplate.xml) as described above will also be available. The names of the variables will be the same as defined in the customer template.

Thus the following basetemplate.xml file:

<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<TEMPLATE>
    <FIELD>
     <DEFINITION NAME="remarks" DESCRIP="Remarks" TYPE="C" MAXLENGTH="100" SIZE="100" ROWS="1" REGEX="" ERRMSG="RIPE remarks" />
    </FIELD>
</TEMPLATE>

will provide the following additional variable to the registrar template

remarks        -> Remarks field for subnet

If there are duplicate variable names defined, the variables in the basetemplate.xml file, then the custtemplate.xml file appearing in the "Additional information" section of the customer and subnet administration pages will have precedence over any standard variables.