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I just recently got turned on to SolarWinds after a friend (Jonathan Bennet) at church and Daryl Hunter of Church IT Guy mentioned their tools in one week. I should start off by mentioning that SolarWinds has a ton of tools available for free and trial usage.  But I thought I’d just discuss one of them today and make you aware of the rest.

IP Address Tracker pretty much explains itself.  After giving it a range, it will go out and see what’s on your network and report back who’s linked to what address.  In a perfect world we’d have a running list of taken and used IP addresses in our head.  Sure we have a spreadsheet that lists what servers and printers are at what IP, but I often find that spreadsheet isn’t where I want it when I want it, and there is always the fear that maybe we overlooked something.

Daryl Hunter gives an amazing walkthrough of the software including installation and setup, so i’m not going to waste time reviewing that, instead I’ll point you to his site and take a look for yourself.  However, I simply wanted to make you aware of this fantastic tool and expain how I’ve already used it twice this week.  First off I had to make some changes to one of the Toshiba printers in our office for a project that involved scanning in over 200 documents into our document scanner.  So I Opened up IP Address Tracker and looked up the IP of the printer and off to work I went, yes my spreadsheet could have easily accomplished this, but it was handy to just check and go.  Secondly, we are adding some new security cameras that require an IP address to monitor the facility during our new construction.  This is where IP Address Tracker comes in really handy.  We designated a section of our 172.30.0.0 scheme to just house security, and I know there are a few devices on it already, but my department isn’t the only one that deals with the security equipment.  So I’m hesitant to be 100% positive that no one has added another IP address to that section.  So by opening IP Address Tracker I was able to quickly see what security equipment is occupying that range and give out two new addresses for the new camera, without any worry that they would be fighting over some other piece of equipment that I wasn’t aware of.