Re: RMON in hardware

[Peter P Morrissey <[e-mail]>]

> The only RMON in hardware that I am aware of involves hubs. Cabletron has
> I think three different models that currently do this and I'm pretty sure
> Synoptics does it. I haven't heard of any router products that do this. It
> would seem that the pocessing burden for routers is already too high to
> consider adding RMON, at least that's my guess.
>
> Pete Morrissey
>
Novell's NetWare LANalyzer Agent (RMON probe) integrates with the NetWare
Multi-Protocol Router to create a solution that shares hardware
resources between routing and monitoring.  In fact, the LANalyzer Agent
can be run in conjunction with all other services that run on NetWare -
file and print, databases, etc.

The LANalyzer Agent toggles promiscous mode off if CPU loading gets excessive.
This preserves the ability to communicate using management protocols and
also allows other applications sharing the hardware to continue operating
normally.

Steve
[e-mail]

Steve,

Good point. I suppose one could also make the case that a Sun worksation
running routed and running RMON agent software would be a similar case.
I guess I was thinking of high end, high thruput, dedicated routers.
Your point, is nevertheless, well taken.

What is a shame about the LANalyzer NLM is that even though it does a pretty
good job at capturing and filtering packets, and even though it has the
memory and CPU resources to accomplish this, it does not support the 
corresponding RMON capture and filter groups. This forces one to use Novell's
proprietary NMS in order to extract this information from the "probe."
It is RMON compliant though because of the groups (I don't recall exactly
which ones at the moment), that it does fully support. 

Perhaps in a future release the capture and filter groups will be supported?

Pete Morrissey
Syracuse University