🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Dec20.191404.1681@julius.cs.uiuc.edu>, zweig@cs.uiuc.edu
(Johnny Zweig) writes:
> Being involved in the somewhat narrow domain of protocol processing software,
> there are aspects of the Networking Scene(tm) I do not fully
understand. Could
> someone give me a succinct, nutshell definition of the term "Network
> Management"? 

My guess is that if they can, its opinion only.  I worked on a project
at Bell Northern Research (BNR, Inc, R&D arm of Northern Telecom) that
was aimed at a sort of any-to-any connectivity system (plug your Goombox
computer into the system and it could connect to an IBM mainframe or DEC
or whatever).  The project died (IMHO due to poor management).  But the
center of it was based on the ability to "see" the network and bring up
or down individual pieces remotely.  So if some modem connection was
broken you would see it as a red icon in the network and could either
re-route traffic or cycle the modem to try to bring it back up.

Network management then was being able to see the network and correct
"faults".  "Faults" is weakly defined though.  They were mostly hardware
(modems, pc's, cluster controllers, etc) faults.  There was little (that
I remember) that dealt with wiring or software problems.

Michael J. Hammel        | mjhammel@{Kepler|socrates}.dell.com
Dell Computer Corp.      | {73377.3467|76424.3024}@compuserve.com
#include <disclaim/std>  | zzham@ttuvm1.bitnet | uunet!uudell!feynman!mjhammel
#define CUTESAYING "Your cute quote here"

mjhammel@Kepler.dell.com (Michael J. Hammel) writes:
>In article <1990Dec20.191404.1681@julius.cs.uiuc.edu>, zweig@cs.uiuc.edu
>(Johnny Zweig) writes:
>> someone give me a succinct, nutshell definition of the term "Network
>> Management"? 

[...]
>But the
>center of it was based on the ability to "see" the network and bring up
>or down individual pieces remotely.  So if some modem connection was
>broken you would see it as a red icon in the network and could either
>re-route traffic or cycle the modem to try to bring it back up.

>Network management then was being able to see the network and correct
>"faults".  "Faults" is weakly defined though.  They were mostly hardware
>(modems, pc's, cluster controllers, etc) faults.  There was little (that
>I remember) that dealt with wiring or software problems.

My comments on network managment are from a consumer perspective. A lot of
net h/w vendors (HP, NAT in Cupertino, David Systems in Mountian View, Synoptics
in MV ) are trying to embed h/w in their components that (a) report
various statistics and (b) can be controlled by a management station.

There are currently 2 types of management schemes leading the field:
S)imple N)etwork M)anagement P)rotocol and ?? (I can't remember) . 
Some vendors can actually demonstrate "management" from a central location.
Many are not quite there yet.  To stay abrest, try to goto/get_a_summary
of the INTEROP network show that goes on every year.

I would like to see "management" evolve into me being able to buy bridges,
concentrators, various net h/w and to have 1 station query, control,
tune, and shut down that multi-vendor h/w I purchased.  There are a
lot of aditional subtleties to this topic I will not address now :-)

To the brave future of network computing ...
-- 
Greg Presedo-Floyd		"Representing myself"
Momenta Corporation		415-969-3876      
Mountian View, CA 94043