Boise State ditches Cisco DNS

Boise State had the same problem. Until this summer, the university was running an old edition of Cisco Network Registrar -- Version 5.5, which was at the end of its life -- on a Windows server for its DNS and DHCP services.

"It was very limited as far as what was actually in the database for DNS and DHCP, and what you could see through the [graphical user interface]," says Diane Dragone, network engineer at Boise State. "There was no easy way to see what was really in the database except through command line tools."

In addition, Boise State had to do custom coding in order to make this older version of Cisco Network Registrar work with all the vendor tags needed for DHCP.

Boise State needed to upgrade the Cisco Network Registrar software, but that option was too expensive, Dragone says.

Cisco ended support for Cisco Network Registrar Version 5.5 in May 2006, and it is now selling Version 7.0 of the software.