Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science

Concordia University

Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science

Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering

INSE7120 Winter 2003-2004

Advanced Network Management– Final Exam

Value: 40%
Time: 150 minutes
Total marks: 40 / ID#______Section: __
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Last name First name

I

a-  What are the five areas of network management defined by the ISO? Comment briefly on each one of them. (2 points)

b-  Define the following terms: managing entity, managed device, management agent, MIB, network management protocol (2 points).

c-  What is the role of the SMI in network management? (1 point)

d-  What is the purpose of the ASN.1 Object Identifier tree? (1 point)

e-  Consider the two ways in which communication occurs between a managing entity and a managed device: request-response mode and trapping. What are the pros and cons of these two approaches, in terms of (i) overhead, (ii) notification time when exceptional events occur (iii) robustness with respect to lost messages between the managing entity and the device? (3 points)

f-  Describes OSI information architecture. (1 point)

II (3 points)

Consider the following variable definitions in ASN.1:

EmployeeNumber ::= [APPLICATION 5] IMPLICIT INTEGER

Name ::= [APPLICATION 3] IMPLICIT VisibleString

Record ::= APPLICATION [35] SEQUENCE {

name Name,

number EmployeeNumber

}

myRecord Record ::= {

name “John”

number 131

}

Encode “myRecord” in TLV format.

NOTE:

INTEGER is UNIVERSAL 2

VisibleString is UNIVERSAL 26

SEQUENCE is UNIVERSAL 16

III- (4 points)
Explain what is:

a-  A community MIB view

b-  SNMP access mode

c-  Community profile

d-  SNMP access policy

IV-

One of the advantages of SNMPv2 over SNMPv1 is the capability of creating/deleting rows in tables. SMIv2 defines a status for each row in a table and Table 1 shows RowStatus textual conventions.

Table 1

Figure 1

a-  Show the sequence of messages between the manager and the agent for creating the two rows in Fig.1 using the “Create-and-Go” operation. Assume index.3 = 3, data.3 = DefData3, index.4 = 4, data.4 = DefData4. (2 points)

b-  Show the operation of deleting row 3 from the table. (2 points)

V-

a-  Discuss the different security threats to network management information (2 points)

b-  What are the services provided by the authentication module and the timeliness module? (2 points)

VI-

a-  Describe a scenario in which customers of a private ATM network can monitor and configure their portions of the public ATM network. Show all the interfaces involved and elaborate on each of them. (3 points)

b-  Your Internet Service Provider (ISP) typically uses equipment of another operator (e.g., ATM) to connect its IP routers (see Figure 2). The ATM service provider does not allow the ISP to access/modify/monitor its ATM network. Explain the advantages of the three x-reference points (shown in figure 2) from the IP service provider to the ATM service provider. (3 points)

c-  Explain the roles of: element management layer, network management layer, and service management layers. (2 points)

Figure 2

VII- Network fault management usually requires methods for detecting, diagnosing and isolating the source of any problem. With centralized management, a single problem may cause multiple symptoms and each symptom is reported as an independent event to the management system. Explain one (of the many) method used to cope with this problem. (3 points)

VIII- What are the limitations of centralized network management systems?, explain one distributed management framework (from those discussed in class) and show clrealy (perhaps through an example) some of the advantages of distributeded management. (4 points)

Winter 2003-04