ALERT: Network Change Affects Users.
A new IP address manager will be cut into production on Saturday, July 17th at 7:00
P.M. Network services will not be available during the two-hour conversion.
Almost all users are affected. Users must shutdown and reboot their
workstations, printers, and servers to receive new addresses.
July 13, 1999
New Network Address Management Software goes Production
 The Networking section of Computer Services will be
converting to an integrated networking address management system from Lucent, called QIP,
on Saturday, July 17th, 1999 at 7:00 p.m. This software is responsible
for automatically distributing network addresses to user's machines similar to the U.S.
Post Office handing out addresses for new homes. When you name your computer, that
name is passed on to QIP which will, in most cases, instantly add this name to its name
server. This way Internet users can find your machine by a user-friendly name
instead of a "meaningless" IP address.
What Do Users Need to Do?
All users will potentially be affected and two options exist to convert to addresses
allocated by the new software.
- Users may power off their workstations, printers, and servers prior to going home for
the weekend. When the machines are restarted on Monday, they will automatically
receive new addresses and work as normal. Please use this option if possible.
Weekend users may restart machines after about 8:00 P.M. on Saturday.
- Advanced users, or users with servers that must remain active, may release and renew
their IP address by Monday morning. A renew operation is not sufficient and will
fail if tried without a preceding release.
Computer names must now adhere to industry standard Internet naming conventions.
Please read the following section entitled "Users Should be Aware of
Behavioral Changes" for details.
Most machines will receive the addresses of name servers automatically. If your
machine is one of the special cases that has name servers explicitly defined, you must
change them to point to the new servers. The old servers will be run in parallel
with the new ones for about a month, then they will be shut down. The current name server addresses
are maintained on the Networking web. Note that the new server addresses won't be
published until they go into production.
Unclaimed Special Addresses or Aliases Will be Deleted!
If you haven't registered your special address or host aliases, then they may not be
transferred to the new system. If transferred, they will be deleted if not claimed prior to July 30th, 1999. We
maintain a current list of unclaimed addresses
on our web. If you think one of these addresses might be yours, please contact
Mark Harsen or
Josh Stuppy.
- We will be fully industry standard on naming conventions. If you name your machine
an illegal name, it will be converted to a legal one as indicated below:
- You can only use letters, number, and a dash (-) in the machine name.
- Your machine name must start with a letter.
- Illegal characters in machine names (including spaces) will be converted to dashes and
leading dashes will be dropped.
- If your machine does not pass a host name (usually Mac computers), or if no legal name
is left after removing illegal characters, then the system will generate a name for you.
This is usually in the form of "uds005762udp".
- If you name your machine the same name as someone else, your machine name will be
appended with a dash and a generated name as in number 5 above.
Names are allocated on a "first come, first served" basis.
- Legally named machines will appear in the name servers immediately instead of having to
wait until 2:00 a.m. the following day. Illegal names or names conflicting with
other names may take up to one hour to appear on the name servers.
- The Missouri State University written code that automatically changed names like "www-something"
into www.something" is no longer supported. If you are one of the very few
people using this feature, please fill out a Special
IP Address request web form. Please contact
Mark Harsen for more information.
- For advanced users, subdomains in the Missouri State University address space are handled with canonical name
records instead of with address records. This means that "www
coba.MissouriState.edu" in the "coba" subdomain will have a primary name of
"www-coba.MissouriState.edu" and an alias of "www.coba.MissouriState.edu". Should
anyone do a reverse lookup on the IP address, it will resolve to the primary name.
This minor difference has been discussed with our web staff and tested. No problems are
anticipated.
- Older machines or operating systems using BOOTP instead of DHCP to get address
information no longer have to be registered in advance. QIP will allocate BOOTP
addresses automatically.
- Machines gaining addresses via BOOTP will get assigned a
generated name (indicated in 5 above) since BOOTP has no provisions for
passing a name to any server.
- Only static addresses and DHCP
reservations requested through the Networking’s Special
IP Address form will be preserved. We will attempt to contact users of
undocumented addresses, but in many cases, it is impossible to identify the users of such
addresses. If you cannot find your special address request on our web, you should
contact Mark Harsen or
Josh Stuppy.
Click for a current list of unclaimed addresses.
- If you have aliases or canonical names for your server, it now requires a special
address. All machines with known contacts will be transferred. Machines or
aliases that are not claimed will be deleted. Please check unclaimed addresses for a
list of addresses that will be deleted if not claimed.
- The facility where a name would be tied directly to a media access control address
regardless of the location of that address is no longer supported.
General questions regarding the conversion should be referred to the
Computer Services Help Desk by calling ext. 5891.
|
