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

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.