NorthStar Released
Hitesh Patel
hitesh at presys.com
Wed Nov 14 08:59:13 UTC 2001
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On Wednesday 14 November 2001 2:24 am, you wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 November 2001, at 21 h 4,
>
>
> It would be intersting to compare the three free tools I know of:
>
> * FreeIPDB <http://www.freeipdb.org/>
> * RoboBijal <http://www.robobijal.org/>
> * NorthStar <http://www.brownkid.net/NorthStar/>
>
> For my limited experience, I can say that FreeIPDB is quite rough,
> absolutely not usable out-of-the-box. Only for people willing to
> participate in the development, I would say.
>
> Robo-Bijal is specialized in RIPE allocation and has nice features for
> people dealing with RIPE (sending updates, for instance).
One of the initial requirements when designing NorthStar was a tool that
combined ease of use, a wide array of features, and extensibility in the same
package. I haven't been able to implement all the features I would like in
the 1.0 release yet, however, I'm working on making the entire system modular
and developing a framework for adding different plugins to facilitate
integration into Billing, Authentication (ie Framed-Route in RADIUS), Routing
Registries (RADB, etc..), and DNS systems.
This is obviously a lot of work, but with a plugin based architecture many of
the tasks can be handled by small community written plugins. NorthStar does
not at this point have features such as automatic netblock assignment and
IPv6 support, however, I believe that support for these items should not be
far away. At this point I would say that NorthStar is ready for use in a
typical ISP environment that has an IP Administrator with moderate experience
in building and maintaining IP networks. Some work on scalability and
additional functionality is required before NorthStar is ready for use in a
provider based (tier-1) environment.
That being said go grab the source, install it and tell me what you think. :-)
- --
Hitesh Patel
hitesh at presys.com
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