next up previous
Next: 3.2.3 Cooperation with existing Up: 3.2 Aspects of modularisation Previous: 3.2.1 Implications on managing

3.2.2 Implications on managed systems

The development principles and implementation methods for the agent remain the same as for the application itself because, using CORBA as underlying software platform, the development of management software becomes a special case of developing information systems. As outlined in the previous subsection, there is neither a specific management protocol nor a specific kind of information representation.

It is therefore more likely that, in the future, an application development team will not only implement the application but also the corresponding management part. The problem of undocumented or even non-existing management interfaces of systems and applications could then be solved. Also, off-the-shelf CASE-tools may be used for the analysis, design and programming for the agent part of an application.

Another issue is security: While in traditional client/server architectures a client could always trust the server, this is no more true for distributed objects due to the frequent role changes of CORBA-clients and -servers. It is therefore important to provide mechanisms on either sides (client and server) to prevent unauthorized execution of functionality. An object implementation must have the ability to check whether a client is authorized to perform functions on the object: With every method call, the ORB runtime system delivers information from which client a service request has been issued. A managed system can therefore authenticate the managing system and decide whether the delegated functionality should be executed or not. As it is impossible for a managed system to determine the semantics of delegated functionality, access control lists have to be maintained by the managed system.


next up previous
Next: 3.2.3 Cooperation with existing Up: 3.2 Aspects of modularisation Previous: 3.2.1 Implications on managing
Copyright Munich Network Management Team