Advantages and Disadvantages of the Script MIB Infrastructure

The drawbacks of classical centralized management systems and the proposal of distributed management to solve them have been discussed in various papers in the past. The IETF vehicle for distributed Internet management is the Script MIB. Jasmin is an implementation of the Script MIB which is freely available for evaluation. This article presents a real life scenario of some management tasks that can be solved by distributed management approaches and have bee n implemented using the Jasmin infrastructure. We do not only discuss the obsrvation of advantages predicted by previous papers, e.g., the reduced CPU an d network load at the management station’s bottleneck, but also the impracticable circumstances of “managing the management”, the development costs of the Script MIB approach, and the pitfalls of running management scripts in remote enviroments.