Articles

Bowl Licker Solves IPAM Host Discovery

The 6ht Yule Lad to arrive, Bowl Licker (Askasleikir) hides under beds while waiting to steal people’s food bowls.

Dec 17th, 2015

The 6ht Yule Lad to arrive, Bowl Licker (Askasleikir) hides under beds while waiting to steal people’s food bowls.

Funny how people hardly ever check under their beds. They only seem to bother if they’ve lost something. Or if they’ve just watched a horror movie. Not that I’m complaining! Their carelessness has kept my belly full for centuries.

In the old days, when Icelanders were all cooped up in their turf houses and often sat on their beds eating, there was plenty of boiled mutton and potatoes left over in their bowls. Nowadays people still eat in their beds at times, but it’s most often some dry, crunchy stuff or sweet, creamy stuff or sometimes orange twiglets. I’ve heard them called “carrots”. I don’t like those very much. But I love the crunchy stuff. And there are so many flavors! Much more choice for me than all that grey meat from before.

The food might be nicer, but even now, nobody seems to care who is under their beds. I’ve sometimes heard them tapping away on their computers, though, cursing and demanding to know which hosts were last seen on their network.

They’re such a careless bunch. If they really cared for host discovery, they could configure host discovery in the Men&Mice Suite. And there’s more than one way to do it! They could either do it through using ping or through querying routers, basically setting a discovery schedule or by placing a router in an SNMP profile.

It’s always good to have a couple of options to choose from. If it wasn’t just so very, very comfy and warm here under the bed, I might even have bothered to use some of my own options, like stealing proper food from the kitchen. Ahh, mmm, warm, so warm. Maybe next Christmas.