Managing your network IPs with IPAM

I have recently started diving back into the world of having a home lab of self hosting a few services for training and home automation and have very quickly remembered prior struggles of remembering IP addresses for servers, DHCP ranges across various VLANs etc so once again find myself setting up an IPAM (IP Address Management) tool.

See previous articles here on my journey so far with my new homelab setup:

Setting up homelab 3.0
Installing a bare-metal Kubernetes cluster with Ansible

What is an IPAM?

An IPAM is a tool for managing IP addresses in your network, good IPAM tools will have a web UI for viewing and editing the resources which are running on IP addresses in your network.

What IPAM tool to use?

Having tried a number of IPAM tools in the past, the only one I can strongly recommend is phpipam.

phpipam has some great features, including:

• A nice, functional UI for viewing and managing your IP addresses
• A scheduler which can run to complete scheduled, routine tasks (such as scanning your network for more IPs in use)
• Detection of hostnames

Previously I have run phpipam within a docker container, but I am going to be writing some Kubernetes manifest files from scratch to deploy into my new cluster, using the documentation from the docker hub…