Network engineering insights, IPAM best practices, and product updates.
Your router handed out addresses in arrival order, and now nothing is where you think it is. How to claim a private range, split static from DHCP, wall off the smart plugs with VLANs, and write down a plan that survives the next rebuild.
Every client kept their router's factory defaults, so every client network is identical. How managed service providers connect, monitor, and document fifty copies of the same subnet with NAT alias schemes, per-client VRFs, and records that treat overlap as normal.
Why a VPN that works at home dies at a hotel, how WireGuard and Tailscale hand out tunnel addresses, and why every overlay vendor settled on 100.64.0.0/10, the block reserved for carrier-grade NAT.
SNAT, DNAT, PAT, and carrier-grade NAT in plain language. How address translation actually works, the two questions that untangle the vocabulary, what NAT quietly costs, and when translation beats renumbering.
The engineer who knew the network is gone and the wiki is three years stale. How to rebuild a trustworthy IP inventory from routing tables, DHCP leases, ARP caches, DNS zones, and careful scans, without changing a single config.
A /24 by reflex wastes space on some segments and overloads others. How to size a subnet for host count, broadcast domain, blast radius, and trust boundary, before the first device joins.
Every Kubernetes cluster quietly claims a /16 for pods. How to size pod, service, and node CIDRs, avoid overlap with VPCs and VPNs, and use carrier-grade NAT space as an escape hatch.
When is a subnet at 80% a problem and when is it fine? The DHCP pool exhaustion math, growth runway forecasting, split vs re-carve decisions, and the utilization thresholds worth alerting on.
Both companies use 10.0.0.0/8 and now they have to connect. A plain-language guide to NAT at the seam, renumbering strategy, and VRFs as the mechanism that keeps both networks running during the transition.
Why two devices end up fighting over the same IP address, how to track down the culprit with the ARP table while the network is still broken, and how to make conflicts stop for good.
A plain-language decision framework for IP assignment: which devices get static addresses, what belongs in the DHCP pool, and how to carve a subnet so the two never collide.
A plain-language guide to IPv6 subnetting. Why every network gets a /64, how nibble boundaries keep plans readable, GUA vs ULA, and why sparse allocation beats conservation.
A plain-language guide to addressing point-to-point network links. When to use a /30, when to use a /31, and when to skip numbering altogether.
A long-form, plain-language tutorial that designs a complete IP address plan from scratch using a fictional mid-size company. Covers aggregation, site allocation, VLAN conventions, cloud carving, and when to use a VRF.
A plain-language reference to the 10 IP address ranges set aside for special use: private networks, carrier-grade NAT, loopback, link-local, documentation, multicast, and more.
How to track and manage IP address space across AWS, Azure, on-premises data centers, and colocation facilities from a single source of truth.
Still managing IP addresses in a spreadsheet? Here are five clear signs your team has outgrown manual IP tracking and needs a real IPAM solution.
A hands-on tutorial for automating IP address management with curl, Terraform, and Ansible using the IPCraft REST API.
A plain-language guide to how IP addresses are divided into networks, what the /24 actually means, and how to pick the right subnet size.
Spreadsheets were never designed to manage IP addresses. Here's what that workaround is actually costing your team in time, mistakes, and outages.
A plain-language guide to VLANs and VRFs, when you need each, and how they let you reuse the same IP ranges safely across different parts of your network.