[ixpmanager] Sorting sort out?

[Rob Lister]

Hello,

This is a long standing issue in IXP Manager, and to be honest, it makes 
it a bit of
a pain when trying to find new IP addresses to assign.

It's been mentioned a few times, but I don't see an issue in Github 
about it.
Maybe we should finally open one.

I would also really like to see this fixed, bit IIRC, it's not that easy 
to do.

The problem is that they're sorted in lexicographical order, which is
not a very useful sort order for human viewing of IP addresses.

 From talking to Barry, ISTR it's because the underlying datatables 
front-end
doesn't allow for an IP address sort, and it's non-trivial to change 
this
because it's used everywhere in the IXP Manager interface.

One possible workaround for it might be to add a hidden sort field, 
based
on the decimal equivalent of the IPv4 address, and then sort on this.

Host address            - 5.57.80.44
Host address (decimal)  - 87642156

As for IPv6 addresses, I'm not sure there's a nice way to sort them.

I never need to look in this list to allocate IPv6 addresses, because
they're always added at the time based on the member's ASN when
new addresses are assigned to their interfaces, rather than being
picked from an (unfeasible enormous) list.

I think in the short term for us, I will forget about this annoying 
list, delete
all the "unused" IPv4 addresses from it, and do our IP Address 
Management for our
Peering LAN in Netbox - https://netbox.readthedocs.io/ where we've 
migrated
everything else to anyway.

Improving IP Address Management is on the longer term Wishlist, but I've
no idea when it will be improved. (Barry maybe able to comment.)

Unlike the patch panels which is great, IXP Manager currently maintains 
no
state or history about IP addresses, for example, it's not really 
possible
to permanently "reserve" an IP address for a member without an interface
(you have to leave it in an empty connection with no port.)

When a member stops using an IP address, we keep it in an "ARP Sponged" 
/ holding
pool for a time before reissuing them.

This is not a major problem for now, because we have enough free space
at the end of the range to just keep assigning fresh IP addresses,
but there may come a time where we need to go back over the used 
addresses
and reassign them.

It's an extra step: go to Netbox, assign an IP address, type that into 
IXP Manager.
The difference is that it's way quicker then spending 5 or 10 minutes 
sifting through
the unsorted list, say, trying to allocate a second IP for an existing 
member,
or trying to work out if an IP which shows as "free" is actually 
"invisibly reserved"
or "held for a bit" "unused but ARP Sponged"

We always used to allocate IPv4 addresses in "nice" sequential pairs, 
even if the member
only connects one port, but I think maybe we have to drop this 
allocation policy if
it becomes too fiddly to administer.

There is not really any "technical" reason for it. It's mostly for 
ease/cosmetic
reasons. It just means that in, say, "sh ip bgp summ" output, two IPs 
from the
same member appear next to each other, it's easy to see if someone's
made a mistake, since a member would never normally have ".52" and ".98" 
and so on.

Port moves and upgrades, swapping the IPs over and moving them around is 
also
currently very fiddly to do in the interface, but that's another 
issue... :)


Rob



On 2020-02-07 11:03, Jan Ferré wrote:
> Hi INEX and friends
> 
> Is it possible to have the IP sort work as an IP sort?
> 
>     1.2.3.1
> 
>     1.2.3.11
> 
>     1.2.3.12
> 

-- 
Rob Lister
rob at lonap.net
+44 20 3137 8330