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Still, Shadow IP's total lack of Unix support is an extremely significant limitation. Without support for Unix, Shadow IP cannot control other daemons on Unix directly. In the case of DNS, this drawback can be overcome by having the Unix DNS servers become secondary servers to a Network TeleSystems Primary DNS server. But if you don't have the company's DHCP servers available on Unix, you are limited to the platforms that Network TeleSystems supports.

Yes, we said platforms. In addition to supporting Windows NT, Network TeleSystems offers something no other vendor provides--a hardware appliance. This nifty-looking machine not only has VGA output with verbose logging, but also LEDs on the front, giving you a readout of not only power and network status, but also DHCP and DNS activity.

With this hardware box as the secondary server, and our Windows NT machine as a primary server, we were able to accomplish another feat that none of the other products could achieve--peer-to-peer redundancy. By contrast, NetID, QIP Enterprise and MetaIP perform a many-to-one failover, in which you have both a primary and secondary server, but the primary server carries out all the work. If the primary server fails, the secondary one takes over. In the peer-to-peer method, both machines share the work, balancing the load between them. If one of the machines is lost, the other picks up all of the work.

On the downside, only Join includes fewer options to configure security levels. With per-machine security attributes, there simply were not enough ways to configure everything as we wished in our tests. This scheme is very limiting if you need to assign different access rights to a number of people.

Shadow IP suffers from a few more omissions. For one, an inability to import or export Unix-style /etc/hosts files is a big drawback (though it's to be expected, given there's no Unix support).

The Shadow IP management system is reasonably priced at $4 per node for 5,000 nodes. The hardware typically adds approximately $7,000 to the price. The hardware is more expensive, but with it you do not need to tax an already overworked Windows NT server, nor do you have to subject Shadow IP to the vagaries of Windows NT Server (such as rebooting). The hardware is quick, booting up in less than 30 seconds.

We found that the GUI still incorporates lots of attractive features, such as a leader board that graphically shows you the status of the IP addresses in your network. We did uncover some glitches, though. For example, when we forgot to fill out everything when creating a subnet, not all of the error messages were decipherable. Also, some options were not intuitive to set. Overall, though, the GUI is very appealing; like NetID and QIP Enterprise's GUIs, it includes full HTTP access via a Java applet.

Network TeleSystems also markets an additional offering for Windows products; IPclient integrates itself to the IP stack already installed on the machine. It fixes many of the things that Microsoft leaves out, including client IDs. With this IP client software, you can also control some of the network card settings over the network, sparing a house call to someone's desk.

Shadow IP Management System, $1,000 to $100,000 depending on size and configuration, Network TeleSystems, (800) 990-4776, (408) 523-8100; fax (408) 523-8118. www.nts.com or sales@nts.com