A Framework for the Integration of Legacy Devices into a Jini Management Federation

Abstract

Abstract. The administration of heterogeneous networks with many devices is a tedious and time-consuming task. Today's approaches only provide static configuration files and make the addition and removal of devices a manual chore. In this paper we present a framework for the integration of legacy devices based on Jini, Sun Microsystem's new technology for federating network devices and services. We introduce extended proxy objects called nannies that take care of non-Jini-enabled devices and handle the relevant management events, guide a device through bootstrapping, register it with the lookup service, and provide the implementation of the administrative interfaces of the Jini API. Through this approach both Jini-enabled and legacy devices can be handled homogeneously in a Jini Management Federation.

An architecture for the coordination of system management services

“…Aschemann et al 15 describe an architecture for the dynamic discovery and configuration of managed objects using Jini** 16 technology. Monitoring and con-trol is mediated by a configuration service, which contains a configuration repository, a scheduling service, protocol adapters, and most relevant here, a "rule base which contains rules and policies to preserve the consistency of the configuration."…”

Distributed retrieval of management information: is it about mobility, locality or distribution?

“…Early work on MbD [2] triggered this quest for decentralization, and was later followed by several proposals. Some of them focused on the evolution in the context of classic network management architectures [3][4] while others, on the other hand, were more closely related to the advances in the field of distributed computing: CORBA-based management [5], Intelligent Agent-based management [6], Javabased management [7], Jini-based management [8], etc. Mobile agents (MA) represent one of the last paradigms going over this cycle of conversion to DNM.…”