[ih] Automated Network Management [was: GOSIP & compliance]

[Miles Fidelman]

For what it's worth....

Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> I can provide some recollections of the origin and intent of ANM - 
> Automated Network Management.
>
> Sometime in early 1983, Bob Kahn and I were talking one day about the 
> Internet.  In particular, we were musing about how the Internet might 
> be operated and managed as EGP was introduced and the Internet became 
> a loose confederation of individual Autonomous Systems, each operated 
> and managed by a separate organization. That was quite different from 
> the ARPANET, which had a centralized management approach with the NOC 
> and refined it over a decade of operation. We had used that ARPANET 
> model as a guide to put the first management mechanisms into the "core 
> gateways", basically using the success of the ARPANET techniques to 
> get the Internet going quickly as a reliable operational 
> communications facility. But, as the saying goes, it was obvious that 
> "it won't scale".
When I arrived at BBN, circa 1985, we were just about to split the 
ARPANET in two (Academic, MILNET), as well as deploy several parallel 
classified networks - to yield the Defense Data Network (DDN).  My first 
assignment was to develop the network management architecture for the 
DDN - which mostly involved developing a CONOPS that fit into the way 
DCA was managing both underlying circuits, and its other networks, and 
coincidentally, modifications to the network management software used 
for the ARPANET.

It actually scaled pretty well.  The nodes basically managed themselves, 
re-routed around failed circuits and nodes, etc. "Network Management" 
consisted of collecting performance & error information, providing 
information to the Network Analysis group for long-range capacity & 
topology planning, and responding to faults, mostly by dispatching 
service requests to carriers, and sometimes dispatching BBN personnel to 
repair nodes (we had the contract).

The major issues that we came across were mostly operational:

- Traditionally, circuit service requests were initiated by base comms. 
officers at either end of a circuit.  It took a lot of procedural and 
contractual changes to get folks like AT&T Long Lines to accept calls 
from BBN staff, manning the three central NOCs (DC, EUR, PAC).

- We had to update our databases to include information about circuit 
ownership, contract details, local points of contact, and such.  As I 
recall, there were some software updates, but most of this was all 
administrative.

- It also turned out that the carriers knew from nothing about "packet 
error rates" - so we had to update systems to report bit error rates.

But, as I say, it all scaled pretty well, for a considerable amount of 
time.  I'm not really sure that things have changed all that much as the 
Internet grew.  It still seems the case that network equipment mostly 
self-manages, network admins use things like Nagios to track statistics 
and errors, ticketing systems to track incidents, and a lot of informal 
communication (e.g., on things like the nanog list) to coordinate 
responses to weird stuff (like routing table corruptions).

Miles Fidelman

-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown