Articles

Release of the Men&Mice Suite version 6.2

Various new features and usability enhancements, making the system more powerful and easier to use.

Jul 2nd, 2010

This new release continues to show commitment in providing high quality enterprise IP address management solutions for organizations running Microsoft and/or Unix/Linux based networks, or a mixture thereof.

Version 6.2 of the Men&Mice Suite contains various new features and usability enhancements, making the system more powerful and easier to use.

Usability, new web UI and enterprise readiness

The new release contains a new web interface. Usability in the web UI has been improved significantly and various new features are available from within the new web UI. Enterprise readiness has been further improved. Through automatic updates it is possible to configure the system so that the server controllers and the Management Console are automatically updated when a new version of Men&Mice Central is installed.

Please review some of the highlights listed below.

Automatic updates.
Management of system updates has been greatly simplified through the Automatic Update feature.  The Men&Mice Suite can be configured so that the server controllers and the Management Console are automatically updated when a new version of Men&Mice Central is installed.

Web Interface.
The web interface has been rewritten from ground up.  Usability has been improved significantly and various new features are available from within the Web UI.

Zone transfers on Windows servers.
Zone transfer settings can be automatically configured on Windows DNS servers when creating dynamic zones or changing zones from static to dynamic, elimininating the need of manually configuring those settings.

IPv6 support in Sites and Subnets.
The Sites and Subnets feature has been improved by allowing the management of IPv6 subnets.

Improved DHCP error checking.
Consistency checking of split scopes on MS DHCP servers has been enhanced by implementing a number of new DHCP consistency checks.

Purging of DNS server cache.
The cache of DNS servers can be purged from within the Men&Mice Suite

Improved display for ranges and scopes.
The list view for ranges and scopes has been improved and now contains information on whether host discovery is enabled.

Cleanup of concurrent leases.
Version 6.2 of the Men&Mice Suite can find and release multiple concurrent DHCP leases for the same MAC address.

Cleanup of Orphaned PTR records.
Orphaned PTR records (PTR records without matching address (A) records) can be hard hard to track down and these records can clutter the DNS environment.
Version 6.2 of the Men&Mice Suite can find and remove orphaned PTR records.

Scope Monitoring.
A common problem on networks using DHCP is the exhaustion of free addresses in DHCP address pools.  The Scope Monitoring feature checks the number of free addresses in DHCP address pools and alerts the user when the addresses are running out.

MS SQL Server support.
Large enterprises require a powerful database to handle the large amounts of data that need to be stored. The Men&Mice Suite now supports the MS SQL Server as a database engine for the system.

The SOAP interface.
The Men&Mice Suite SOAP interface enables access to and from external applications or scripts using industry standard protocols. The SOAP interface is being used by the new web UI.  
The SOAP interface has been further improved and documented with sample code.  Combined, these tools can be used to customize the solution by creating customer specific web tasks.