Tabbed bookmarks for monitoring multiple subnets
2 posts
We would like to monitor several subnets at the same time, so we can discover wasted IPs over a period of time and clear them from DHCP reservations. It would be really useful to be able to have tabbed bookmarks, so we can set multiple monitors up, e.g. for each subnet, then simply select the tab we want to view.
I think currently we can only scan whichever bookmark we have loaded, so unless we have multiple application windows open, we can't monitor multiple bookmarks at the same time, unless of course we had them all in one window, but this would be harder to view/manage. Having separate bookmark tabs that show their corresponding scans would make it much easier to view.
Would this be possible?
Thanks for the suggestion! The need behind it — tracking down unused IPs across multiple subnets — is a really sensible one, so we want to give it a proper answer rather than a quick yes/no.
Why tabs are trickier than they seem
NetScanner's interface is built around a single "current scan" — the range field, Start/Stop, options dialog, column picker and status bar all act on that one scan. Adding tabs would mean every one of those controls has to ask "which tab am I for?", and quite a few settings could reasonably be either per-tab or global (columns, timeouts, scan options) with no answer that wouldn't surprise users one way or the other.
There are also some awkward corners:
- If a tab is bound to a bookmark and you edit that bookmark elsewhere, what should happen to the open tab?
- Several scans running side-by-side end up fighting over the same network adapter, ARP cache and DNS resolver.
- Saving a "workspace" of tabs gets messy when bookmarks are later renamed or deleted.
All solvable in principle, but it's a lot of rework for an end result of "you can look at four tabs of results at once", which isn't really how the wasted-IP problem gets solved in practice.
Two alternatives that might fit better
- Scheduled unattended monitoring. NetScanner runs your subnet scans on a timer (e.g., hourly) in the background and keeps a log of first-seen and last-seen timestamps per IP. After a week or a month, the IPs with old last-seen dates are your candidates for reclaim.
- A two-way MAC-to-IP history database. Every scan feeds into a small database recording which IPs each MAC has ever held, and which MACs each IP has ever held. Same underlying insight as option 1, but with greater diagnostic power: you can spot reservations that haven't been claimed by their MAC in months, devices that keep getting fresh leases instead of reusing an old one, and IPs that have gone quiet entirely.
Which of these sounds closer to what you'd actually find useful day-to-day? And if it's option 2, how would you ideally want to get the data: a built-in report inside NetScanner, a CSV export, or direct query access to the database?