[kaliszad]

Sounds like a very bad IPAM - probably was a good move to sell it, since it showed all the places, where the network was not managed well and brought in a decent sum. At least so it seems from the few sentences you have written.

Also, in year 2018 GE could have been ready for IPv6 but that would require not only existing IPAM but also some proper leadership, which based on your words GE doesn't seem to have.

[unethical_ban]

What's IPAM? Until about five years ago my F100 company barely used more than a network drive excel sheet for our public /16 + RFC1918, and they contacted the network security team to ask what addresses were used in the firewall NAT tables to determine what was free to use.

[EricE]

Something like https://www.globalservices.bt.com/en/solutions/products/diam...

Used it at a previous org I worked for. Pretty nice - it can crawl your routers, build up your existing network allocations then help you analyze/optimize them.

Stupid powerful - we used it mostly for decentralized DNS management (!!) but after a while I finally got the network and security folks to realize what the system could do and the spreadsheets started to finally go away.

Speaking of decentralized management it has robust hierarchical role-based security - we had thousands of site admins managing DNS and eventually IP addresses for their individual sites, but also smoothly maintaining overall command-control. A very cool system.

[dijit]

IP Address Management systems. Similar to solarwinds Orion.

We used that particular product extensively at my previous company. If you stole an ip without putting it into Orion there was a job that would enumerate/update info, if possible.

If the job failed, you and your boss would get an angry email.

This was in a company probably much smaller than F500.