Re: Linux CMU-SNMP - assumes constant 308 bytes/packet

Juergen Schoenwaelder (schoenw@gaertner.de)
Sat, 12 Jul 1997 19:01:38 +0200

Mark Purcell <msp@pos.apana.org.au> said:

Mark> Now that the Linux kernel accounting (ipfw) can produce more
Mark> accurate estimates of traffic flow are there any plans afoot
Mark> to include this more accurate data in the Linux CMU-SNMP port?

Erik Schoenfelder <schoenfr@gaertner.de> already patched the Linux CMU
SNMP agent to take advantage of the statistics available in newer
Linux kernels. Just wait for the next release and install a new
kernel which supports this feature.

Mark> While I have the floor, tkined is great and I use it on a
Mark> regular basis, a 'Web-based management' interface would make
Mark> it even better :-) I have been dumping the network map to a
Mark> .gif using movie.tcl, but the results could be better. With
Mark> their plans for Tcl world dominiation Sun have devloped a Tcl
Mark> browser plug in. Is there potential that in the future we may
Mark> see tkined running inside a Tclk/Tk plugin on our favourite
Mark> browser. Now that would be neat!

There are two things to consider here:

(1) There is a strong need to split Tkined itself into a client
server applications. The core of the server has already been
written. Note, this is a complete rewrite of the Tkined core and
it is somewhat different from the model used by Tkined. There are
still some open questions on how to attach clients (like user
interfaces). There might be different clients for a server. One
client will probably look much like Tkined, but other interfaces
should be possible. I am also considering to open the server
interface to arbitrary languages, which would allow to write GUIs
in Java or probably even an emacs mode. (I would seriously like to
have such an emacs mode.)

(2) A Web-Interface should IMHO look quite different than Tkined
looks today. Those stand-alone applications I have seen that have
been converted to Web-applications without redesigning the GUI
usually look strange and are ugly to use. I believe that a Web GUI
has to be designed to fit into the Web and it should be written to
accommodate the Web user, which is probably not the typical Tkined
user. I wrote an experimental HTML based interface which shows the
nodes etc. sorted by their health. You could for example klick on
nodes and look at a history of event messages recorded for that
node. I found this much more appropriate for e.g. support people
who just want to quickly check if everything is OK or what went
wrong.

I just decided to move to Tcl8.0/Tk8.0 because it seems to become
stable and the namespaces really help to organize the code. My recent
travel activities have killed all my time schedules. So I better make
no promises. I will however bring my current version to Boston next
week so that curious people can look at it.
Juergen

-- 
Juergen Schoenwaelder <jschon@research.bell-labs.com>   Tel. +1 908 582 6794
Lucent Technologies, Bell Laboratories, Room 2c-229,    Fax. +1 908 582 5809
600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, NJ 07974
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