CS204 Fall 2003
Learning to Use Standards Documents
Due: 11:59pm Friday October 10, 2003
I. Summary
The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) is used to support the
monitoring and control of a wide variety of networking equipment (such
as routers, switches, etc.) from a remote location, through the
exchange of "in band" packets across the network. To understand it in
detail, you must consult multiple standards documents, which are
controlled by more than one standards organization. In this assignment,
you must determine which set of standards documents are necessary for
you to check that a particular implementation of SNMP is
standards-compliant, and also what would be the process for changing
the standard to add or modify some particular feature?
II. Detailed Questions
- In an Ethernet "switch" (i.e., a layer-2 transparent bridge), one
can use the SNMP protocol to: (a) retrieve a count of the total number
of octets (i.e., bytes) received from port i since the last time the switch
was rebooted, and (b) select whether or not to run the Spanning Tree
protocol on port i. What are
the formats of the SNMP request packets and the associated response
packets for querying this octet counter, and for instructing the
Spanning Tree protocol to run. You must cite references from the
appropriate standards document to explain the general format of the
SNMP packet, the names of each object you wish to manage, and the
format of the results returned.
- Describe the process for changing an IETF standard. (Assume the
goal is to modify an existing standard to include one extra managed
object, rather than to create a completely new standard from beginning
to end.) Who makes the decision? How do you become one of the
decision-makers? How long does it take.
- Repeat question 2 for the case where you wish to change an IEEE
802 standard.
III. What to turn in.
An online document (PDF preferred, but plain text is OK) containing
your written answers to the three questions above. Note that your
answers can include references to online documents or other web pages.
However, even if you find a document that contains the exact answer to
the question, you must still provide a summary in your own words,
rather than just telling me to read the other document(s). In
addition, your answers to question 1 must be specific: don't just tell me the
answer is located somewhere in document X without identifying the
particular section/clause, figure, or table that contains the
information.