Nathanc, I find some of your statements about SNMP and RMON to be slightly inaccurate. I suppose I should also say that to me at least, Hatim's implications of the capabilities of SNMP are also exaggerated.
To those who aren't interested, forgive me this little technological digression.
All versions of SNMP provide a means for a network manager at a central location to collect statistics from individual devices elsewhere on the network, to change some configurable parameters on those devices, and provide for notification of alarms.
One operative thing to note about SNMP is that it is a management protocol, not a configuration protocol. SNMP was not intended for, and not well suited for remote operation and configuration tasks. I would not say that a device implementing only SNMP is fully remotely operable.
SNMPv1 is well defined and standardized. It does not report only whether a device is functioning properly or not. All versions of SNMP only report statistics when polled. No interpretation of the information is made. One serious shortcoming of SNMPv1 is that it has no real security mechanism. Access is controlled by specifying a "community", which is in effect a plain-text password sent in the clear over the network.
SNMPv2 was an effort to extend SNMPv1 by adding additional features, including improved support for tabular information, a wider variety of data types, and improved security. SNMPv2 was first published as a set of proposed Internet standards in March, 1993, and revised again in 1996. In the course of the 1996 revisions, a number of fatal flaws in the security mechanisms of SNMPv2 were demonstrated, and the security working group was unable to come to a consensus as to how to fix the problem. Rather than waste additional time, the group decided to abandon SNMPv2 security, and use the old SNMPv1 community based access control. The result was "Community Based SNMPv2" or "SNMPv2c".
Your statement that SNMP gathers network data from a single type of MIB, and that RMON defines nine additional MIBs doesn't seem to make much sense. MIBs are heirarchical families of related information organized according to the Structure of Management Information (SMI). These include groups for system, protocol, and interface management. In addition, organizations wishing to do so may request to be allocated an "enterprise" MIB which allows them to define and implement vendor-specific MIB extensions.
RMON and RMON 2 provide remote monitoring capabilities. RMON "probes" are placed throughout the network to monitor activity on remote segments. These probes may be hardware dedicated to the purpose, or they may be integrated with routers or other network infrastructure equipment. RMON attempts to gather information characteristic of the network itself, not just a particular station on the network.
RMON is not a replacement for SNMP. In fact, RMON uses SNMP to report gathered information in the RMON MIB back to a central monitoring station.
Once again, my apologies to those who aren't interested. I hope this provides a little more information for those who may have been. |
