An Effective Monitoring and Management Mechanism of IP Address Assignments

摘要

Nowadays, most networks use DHCP to automatically assign unique IP addresses. Nevertheless, the IP address conflict problem still exists. This is because users can freely change their own IP addresses even DHCP is applied in the network. How to effectively detect the mistaken use of IP addresses is an important issue for network managers. In this paper, we propose an effective monitoring mechanism of IP address assignments. Since active IP addresses can be observed in routers, we can use SNMP to retrieve those IP addresses and their corresponding MAC addresses. By the analysis of DHCP logs, we can identify the hosts using illegal IP addresses. Consequently, the IP address conflict problem can be effectively solved. The burden of network management can be significantly reduced.