Реферат: CMIP Vs SNMP Network Management Essay

as well as majoring operating systems. It has even been put to use inside the

Coca-Cola machines at Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California (Borsook,

48). Because of SNMP’s smaller size, it has even been implemented in such

devices as toasters, compact disc players, and battery-operated barking dogs.

In the 1990 Interop show, John Romkey, vice president of engineering for

Epilogue, demonstrated that through an SNMP program running on a PC, you could

control a standard toaster through a network (Miller, 57).

SNMP is by no means a perfect network manager. But because of it’s simple

design, these flaws can be fixed. The first problem realized by most companies

is that there are some rather large security problems related with SNMP. Any

decent hacker can easily access SNMP information, giving them any information

about the network, and also the ability to potentially shut down systems on the

network. The latest version of SNMP, called SNMPv2, has added some security

measures that were left out of SNMP, to combat the 3 largest problems plaguing

SNMP: Privacy of Data (to prevent intruders from gaining access to information

carried along the network), authentication (to prevent intruders from sending

false data across the network), and access control (which restricts access of

particular variables to certain users, thus removing the possibility of a user

accidentally crashing the network). (Stallings, 213)

The largest problem with SNMP, ironically enough, is the same thing that

made it great; it’s simple design. Because it is so simple, the information it

deals with is neither detailed, nor well organized enough to deal with the

growing networks of the 1990’s. This is mainly due to the quick creation of SNMP,

because it was never designed to be the network management protocol of the

1990’s. Like the previous flaw, this one too has been corrected with the new

version, SNMPv2. This new version allows for more in-detail specification of

variables, including the use of the table data structure for easier data

retrieval. Also added are two new PDU’s that are used to manipulate the tabled

objects. In fact, so many new features have been added that the formal