NorthStar IP Address Tracking System
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Welcome to the README file.  This file provides some basic information about
NorthStar.  For installation instructions please read the INSTALL file.

What is NorthStar
	
     NorthStar is a system to help track and allocate IP Addresses 
     in an IP Network.  My company currently uses this system to 
     track and maintain all of it's IP Allocation and to some extent 
     tracking things such as Out-of-band access ports, Remote Power 
     Control ports, DNS information and other information that can 
     be related to a specific device. NorthStar was written in Perl 
     and should be fairly portable to most platforms. 

Features

     This is by no means a complete list of features that NorthStar 
     provides, however should give a good idea of what the system can do

        o Tracking of IPv4 address information (IPv6 is in the works) 
        o Hierchical Tracking that ties every allocation back to a 
          specific Device, Location, and Owner 
        o Customizable Templates 
        o Assignments can be nested without any limit (for instance 
          and /19 can be split into 2 /20's and so on) 
        o User permissions systems that allows specific users to only 
          perform specific tasks 
        o Address range creation (assign 192.168.0.1 - 192.168.0.128 
          to a specific Device and Owner and automatically assign DNS 
          information (ppp-X-X-X-X.dialup.network.net) 
        o Much more that i'm probably forgetting ;-) 

License

     NorthStar is currently licensed under the GNU General Public License. 
     You may find a copy of the GPL at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
     A copy of the license is also provided in the COPYING file.

Requirements

     NorthStar currently requires the following components to be installed:

        o Perl 5 
        o PostgreSQL 7.1.x 
	o DBI 1.x
	o Postgres DBI Driver (DBD-Pg-1.x)
        o Apache Web Server (or any other web server capable of HTTP 
          Authnetication)

