Chapter14.Address Management Tactics

Chapter 14. Address Management Tactics

The previous chapter looked at some of the different network environments and how each environment can affect how you plan for and manage an address space. This chapter expands on this foundation by introducing some of the tactics you can use to manage an address space day-to-day.

When discussing address management with hostmasters, I have yet to find one who described the job as an exact science. In fact, the usual response is an uncomfortable shrug and a sheepish admission that the job is really more of an art than a science. As such, very few universal rules apply. Success in this capacity depends on the hostmaster's innate grasp of binary mathematics vis-à-vis organizational requirements. Given the fluidity of requirements, you can see why I said address management is more art than science.

This chapter examines some of the more common approaches to address space management, explores their strengths and weaknesses, and looks at how each tactic works in a realistic context. This will leave you with ample food for thought should you someday be responsible for managing an address space. The tactics I will show you can be used to create networks within large address spaces or even subnets locally within a network. More important, they can work with all the strategies you saw in Chapter 13, "Planning and Managing an Address Space."