Thanks for the responses on the REGEX for IP addresses. I had two motivations for writing this script. Using it for work was/is my primary concern BUT I would like it to be as robust as possible so that others could use it. Fortunately at work, we use the standard IP4 with no omitted octets. BUT I am interested in trying to get it to work with IP6 and the shorthand form of the IP address.

I plan to immediately implement the regex that was supplied earlier BUT the problem I saw was with my hostname regular expression.

Couldn't you have a hostname like 123.empire.com? Is it possible to have 123.224.empire.com? I am guessing that what I will need to do is make sure that last octet contains [a-zA-z].