On Fri, 12 Sep 2008 11:53:56 +0200 Stein Magnus Jodal stein.magnus.jodal@uninett.no wrote:
Any cases I've forgotten, misunderstood or which are incomplete?
Nothing? I'm a bit surprised if I have an approximately complete understanding of IP Info already. Lets get back to it when I'll start working on replacing IP Info.
Vidar posted the scenario you missed: That the IP is not monitored by NAV, but exists in ARP data.
Alternatively, one could link to ipinfo from the "Actions" list in ipdevinfo until this last ipinfo feature are added to ipdevinfo.
For 3.5.0, I vote for your alternative solution. That is, if the actions list is also present when searching for a host unknown to NAV.
Fixed, for both known and unknown hosts.
Confirmed, just what I wanted :-)
Some of the information (arp/mac/lastseen) displayed by ipinfo is downright confusing to some, since there can be an absolute mismatch between the arp and cam records used in the display. The arp record could be five weeks old, while the cam record is current, meaning that the IP is not active and the machine that last had it now probably has a different IP altogether.
The only reason all this information was mashed together in a single view was to enable the local output configuration, which can use all the variables from an ipinfo page to construct its output.
So, I should not add any of these (arp/mac/lastseen) to the IP device view?
To swallow ipinfo functionality into ipdevinfo, yes you do.
So far, all you do is the DNS lookup. For any IP address you can check whether it matches any of the prefices registered in NAV. If it matches, we want to show details about the prefix and the associated VLAN: CIDR of subnet, vlan id, vlan usage, vlan description, vlan organization, and perhaps organizational contact data (opt1-3).
The next thing you can do is check if there are any ARP entries for the given IP address. Instead of doing the ipinfo "confusion-operation" at this point, you could display the end_time timestamp of the latest ARP record that matches the IP address and make that text a hyperlink to the machine tracker IP search.
By implementing this, you'll have replaced all but one feature of the ipinfo tool, and that's the local output config feature. Which we need to rewrite into something else, as described in my previous post.
Writing a blueprint, designing and implementing that in time for 3.5.0, though, is improbable (but not impossible ;) ), which is why we're keeping ipinfo around for the time being.