Last updated: November 9, 2020
Who hasn’t been faced with the problem of installing a new IT system, but you have no idea which IP address is still free. The only clue is an ancient Excel list whose last date of processing was years ago. Probably several colleagues are still working in the IT department, so that everyone has a different level of knowledge. So there is no point in asking questions.
So what to do? Which IP addresses are still free in the network and which are already assigned?
Doubled IP addresses should be avoided at all costs
You should never assign IP addresses “on the off-chance”. The danger of assigning an IP address twice is much too high. But even in stand-alone devices there is a high risk of double IP assignment. If a rarely used system has been offline for a longer period of time (standby) and it is reconnected to the network, it can happen that the IP has been assigned to another device in the meantime, which is now active in the network under this address.
No matter how the IP addresses are assigned, if one of them is assigned twice, this can cause big problems.
If two systems with the same IP address are on the same network, it can happen that sometimes one and sometimes the other system is accessible via this IP. Or one of them will be completely deactivated and is no longer accessible. Data loss, broken connections etc. are the result.
Depending on which systems are involved, this may not be noticed at all or only after months. But usually such a misconfiguration will come to light very quickly, if you are unlucky, because of a serious production loss.
For this reason a clean and clear IP allocation is extremely important and a basic requirement for professional network management.
Find free IP addresses with the help of Docusnap
With Docusnap, IP address assignment is no longer a problem.
During the regular and automatic inventory of the entire IT network, all IP addresses of all systems are also recorded. On the basis of this data, Docusnap creates a simple and clear report on which systems have been assigned which IP addresses and which IP addresses are still available. With Docusnap you will never again have to search for free IP addresses.
That’s Docusnap: