LYNCH@A.ISI.EDU.UUCP (04/14/87)
FORMATION OF A NETWORK MANAGEMENT WORKING GROUP
The Internet Activities Board in conjunction with its Internet
Engineering Task Force is forming a Network Management
Working Group composed of representatives from the Internet
community and vendors of TCP/IP products. The group will
develop a set of RFCs that define tools to manage systems
containing multiple vendor TCP/IP products. The working
group is expected to focus on detailing a framework for
management of TCP/IP based networks, the control and
monitoring information to be managed, and the protocols
necessary for the exchange of management information. Near
term solutions that can result in vendor implementations will
be stressed.
The Working Group's first meeting will be held on May 5th,
1987, at TECHMART, the Silicon Valley Marketing Center, in
Santa Clara, CA, from 9-4 in Suite 125. Adjacent to the
Doubletree Hotel and the Santa Clara Convention Center,
TECHMART is at 5201 Great America Parkway. Please contact
Dan Lynch, Advanced Computing Environments, 408-996-2042,
if you plan to attend so proper arrangements may be made. The
meeting will be open to all users and vendors.
Lee LaBarre from the Mitre Corporation will chair this
meeting. Please contact him at 617-271-8507 if you wish to
be included in the following agenda.
The agenda for the first meeting will include the following:
- Discussion of the scope and schedule of the project. A
candidate proposal will be presented.
- Presentations on models for network management. Lee
LaBarre will present the ISO and IEEE models.
- Presentations on TCP/IP parameters to be managed.
- Presentations on protocols for management exchanges.
A long term work list for the group is as follows:
a) Agree on the scope of network management and the
areas of management to be addressed. The possible areas
include:
configuration management
fault management
performance management
security management
accounting management
The group might reasonably choose to only address the
first three areas.
b) Determine the management requirements in the chosen
areas.
c) Determine a framework, or model, for network
management. The group should examine models developed by
standards organizations such as ANSI and IEEE, and any
models being developed for management of the Arpanet or
MILNET. If possible, the model should be based on existing
work done by the standards bodies. This does not imply that
we should track evolving standards, but that we might benefit
from their work. It may be desirable to develop a common
model to ease the management of networks that contain DoD
and ISO protocol suites. Vendors could then use the same
network management system to manage products in both
suites.
d) Determine for each layer of the DoD suite the
parameters to be managed, e.g., protocol parameters (timers,
max. no. of connections, max. segment size, no. of
retransmissions), statistics (counts on segments, octets sent
and received, refused connections, retransmissions, discarded
datagrams, etc).
e) Determine the protocol for exchanging management
information. Candidates to be examined from the standards
area include ISO's Common Management Information Protocol
(CMIP) and the protocol defined by the IEEE for management
exchanges. A protocol suitable for encoding management data
to be transferred among machines with heterogeneous storage
formats is CCITT X.409 (ISO ASN.1).
f) Document the above decisions as a set of RFCs.
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