579 research outputs found
A uniform resource identifier scheme for SNMP
One of the World Wide Web characteristics, besides its omnipresence in computer systems, is the adoption of a universal user interface that is used to access several different services that were previously accessed individually by independent applications. The Internet resources started to be identified by URI schemes, a text string with specific syntax and grammar. Although existing for several services such as http, ftp, gopher and news, these identifiers are not used to identify SNMP resources. This paper proposes an URI scheme for identifying SNMP resources and presents some practical scenarios where the existence of such compact and complete identifying mechanism increases flexibility and functionality of network management applications
Distributed management: implementation issues
Management processes have to react on time to the
new challenges put by a crescent movement of the computing
world to the Internet paradigm. The enormous base of legacy
knowledge and legacy systems leads the SNMP management
framework to a necessary choice in nowadays management
scenarios. However, even with the recent SNMPv3, its services
correspond roughly to low-level operations for setting or
retrieving network equipment parameters. The IETF
Distributed Management working group have been producing
normalization documents that intent to apply to the
enrichment of SNMP semantics, especially in what concerns
the processing of management information.
This paper will present the recent outcome of this WG and
will discuss an implementation project that aims to apply
mobile agent technology in these scenarios
A web services based framework for efficient monitoring and event reporting.
Network and Service Management (NSM) is a research discipline with significant research contributions the last 25 years. Despite the numerous standardised solutions that have been proposed for NSM, the quest for an "all encompassing technology" still continues. A new technology introduced lately to address NSM problems is Web Services (WS). Despite the research effort put into WS and their potential for addressing NSM objectives, there are efficiency, interoperability, etc issues that need to be solved before using WS for NSM. This thesis looks at two techniques to increase the efficiency of WS management applications so that the latter can be used for efficient monitoring and event reporting. The first is a query tool we built that can be used for efficient retrieval of management state data close to the devices where they are hosted. The second technique is policies used to delegate a number of tasks from a manager to an agent to make WS-based event reporting systems more efficient. We tested the performance of these mechanisms by incorporating them in a custom monitoring and event reporting framework and supporting systems we have built, against other similar mechanisms (XPath) that have been proposed for the same tasks, as well as previous technologies such as SNMP. Through these tests we have shown that these mechanisms are capable of allowing us to use WS efficiently in various monitoring and event reporting scenarios. Having shown the potential of our techniques we also present the design and implementation challenges for building a GUI tool to support and enhance the above systems with extra capabilities. In summary, we expect that other problems WS face will be solved in the near future, making WS a capable platform for it to be used for NSM
On the use of mobility in distributed network management
Information Technology has been under unprecedented
transformations and it is dramatically changing the way
of work inside organizations. Information management
systems must be adequate to cope with the profound
effects of this evolution, which expectations includes the
introduction into the networks of enormous quantities of
different elements. Mobile agent paradigm seems to be,
for many researchers, the right solution to deal with the
pressures of these new demands.
This paper discuss the issues around mobility of code on
network management environments and presents ongoing
work that provides mobility capability to distributed
managers upon recent work of IETF’s Disman working group
Distributed management based on mobile agents
During the forthcoming years, Internet-based concepts will continue to revolutionize, in an
unpredictable way, the mode enterprises provide, maintain and use traditional information
technology. Management systems will be a crucial issue in the struggle with this crescent
complexity. However, new requirements have to be considered, due to the expectation of
enormous quantities of different elements, ranging from an impressive network bandwidth
availability to multimedia QoS-constrained services. Many researchers believe that mobile
agent paradigm can provide effective solutions on these new scenarios.
This paper presents an implementation of management applications supported upon
distribution and delegation concepts. For that it uses the current work of IETF’s Disman
working group enhanced with mobility provision. The mobility allows the distributed
managers to adapt dynamically to a mutable environment optimizing the use of network
resources
Towards Automated Network Configuration Management
Modern networks are designed to satisfy a wide variety of competing goals related to network operation requirements such as reachability, security, performance, reliability and availability. These high level goals are realized through a complex chain of low level configuration commands performed on network devices.
As networks become larger, more complex and more heterogeneous, human errors become the most significant threat to network operation and the main cause of network outage. In addition, the gap between high-level requirements and low-level configuration data is continuously increasing and difficult to close. Although many solutions have been introduced to reduce the complexity of configuration management, network changes, in most cases, are still manually performed via low--level command line interfaces (CLIs). The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) has introduced NETwork CONFiguration (NETCONF) protocol along with its associated data--modeling language, YANG, that significantly reduce network configuration complexity. However, NETCONF is limited to the interaction between managers and agents, and it has weak support for compliance to high-level management functionalities.
We design and develop a network configuration management system called AutoConf that addresses the aforementioned problems. AutoConf is a distributed system that manages, validates, and automates the configuration of IP networks. We propose a new framework to augment NETCONF/YANG framework. This framework includes a Configuration Semantic Model (CSM), which provides a formal representation of domain knowledge needed to deploy a successful management system. Along with CSM, we develop a domain--specific language called Structured Configuration language to specify configuration tasks as well as high--level requirements. CSM/SCL together with NETCONF/YANG makes a powerful management system that supports network--wide configuration. AutoConf supports two levels of verifications: consistency verification and behavioral verification. We apply a set of logical formalizations to verifying the consistency and dependency of configuration parameters. In behavioral verification, we present a set of formal models and algorithms based on Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) to capture the behaviors of forwarding control lists that are deployed in firewalls, routers, and NAT devices. We also adopt an enhanced version of Dyna-Q algorithm to support dynamic adaptation of network configuration in response to changes occurred during network operation. This adaptation approach maintains a coherent relationship between high level requirements and low level device configuration.
We evaluate AutoConf by running several configuration scenarios such as interface configuration, RIP configuration, OSPF configuration and MPLS configuration. We also evaluate AutoConf by running several simulation models to demonstrate the effectiveness and the scalability of handling large-scale networks
AgentAPI: an API for the development of managed agents
Managed agents, namely SNMP agents, costs too much to develop, test and maintain. Although assuming simplicity since its origins, the SNMP model has several intrinsic aspects that make the development of management applications a complex task. However, there are tools available which intend to simplify this process by generating automatic code based on the management information definition. Unfortunately, these tools are usually complicated to use and require a strong background of programming experience and
network management knowledge. This paper describes an API for managed agent development which also provides multiprotocol capabilities. Without changing the code, the resulting agent can be managed by SNMP, web browsers, wap browsers, CORBA or any other access method either simultaneously or individually
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