At first, we found IPcentral's administration interface more difficult to use than Cisco Systems' impressive Network Registrar. But once we got accustomed to it, we felt the interface's capabilities and ease of use actually surpassed that of Network Registrar.

IPcentral views everything as if it were looking through a network administrator's eyes. This relieves your systems staff from having to deal with daily DNS and DHCP changes. In contrast, database-centric systems, such as Quadritek's QIP and Bay's NetID, take a system administrator's point of view, with all the added work that perspective entails.

One of the features that we tested in the previous version of IPserver--and that we're glad to see once again in this release--is IPcentral's leader-board, which provides a graphical overview of the status of all IP address ranges in your network. The screen presents spaces for each of the IP addresses on your subnet, and different colors represent various states, such as assigned, unassigned, dynamic DHCP, static DHCP and even reserved addresses. This tool made it easy for us to grasp the address situation of our entire network and made our testing more productive.

However, for all that Network Telesystems' product suite has to offer, IPcentral suffers in the same area as many other Windows NT-based solutions--performance. Using Unix-based solutions, such as JOIN Systems' JOIN IP Management System, we loaded more than 100,000 nodes. But we didn't come close to that amount using any of the Windows NT-based IP management products.

Quadritek Systems QIP 4.0

Quadritek is aiming for a knockout with the development of its QIP product: QIP 4.0 offers a server that is both Unix-based and Windows NT-based. With such a strong server solution, we expected the installation process to go smoothly, but we were a little disappointed. However, after installation was completed, all systems were full speed ahead.

Like Bay Networks' NetID, QIP lets you manage both Windows NT and Unix servers. In our tests of the Unix server, we were able to store more than 50,000 IP addresses with few problems. In contrast, the Windows NT version of QIP--in common with all the other products that run on Windows NT--slowed down dramatically when we approached, and then surpassed, 50,000 nodes.

In our tests, we were able to import and export large amounts of data from the QIP server, which emphasized the product's solid data-liquidity capabilities.

But QIP does not offer RFC 1995 support, more commonly known as DNS incremental updates. The vendor says incremental updates have difficulties with large numbers of clients updating DNS servers because each incremental update prompts the generation of a new serial number. While the absence of this feature is not a terrible loss, the normal operation of 50,000 nodes can kill even the beefiest of servers.

Bypassing the GUI QIP ships with a complete set of command-line access tools that enabled us to perform tasks without using the product's GUI--a rarity in IP address management products. Scripting languages, such as Perl, can be very useful and save you time, as you can automate many functions that you would otherwise have to enter manually into the system. Since these systems often are much more than configuration files that people are able to read, command-line programs are necessary to manipulate information directly in the product's database.

QIP, like NetID, requires an external database to store its files, so you can use your organization's database to store the IP data. In this way, the database is most likely better maintained on higher-end hardware and backed up more frequently.

Bay Networks NetID

NetID's user interface really hasn't changed much since we reviewed it last year. With support for more servers and numerous methods for importing and exporting data, NetID keeps the data flowing. Unfortunately, NetID does not support BIND 8.1 DDNS features.

Nevertheless, NetID's proprietary methods for DDNS and incremental updates make up for the features NetID lacks. It continues to update its information dynamically, but restricts you to using only NetID's servers.