Question

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USING YOUR OWN WORDS
COURSE Network Management
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Q- Ping and trace route are used together to discover the topology of a network.
Explain how the NMS uses these two commands and the MIB to determine the hierarchy in the LAN?

Answer 1

Hi,

Ping is the most simplest command that can be used for managing a network, it interanally uses ICMP protocol. Ping uses echo request and echo reply messages for its working, basically it sends a message to a given ip and waits for its reply, and after it gets a reply from the given ip, it shows how much time it took to get the reply, or if the reply doesn't come it shows timout message. So it can be used to know if the ip address is reacheable or not.

Traceroute is a simmilar command like ping but the difference is that it sends the message to each hope and waits for the reply, and note the time. That is it will first send the message the first hope and get the reply, than it will send the message to the next hope and get the reply and so on untill it gets to the given ip address. In this way we will know what was the path that was followed to reach the ip address. And if we could not reach the ip address where were we stuck.

MIB is a formatted text file that lists all of the data objects used by a particular device. Each device has OIB's which is a kind of id. To understand this concept in easy language you can think of SNMP manager that uses your MIB file to know about your device, similarly it has knowledge about many other devices. Similarly this MIB will be stored in routers, switches, your computer and this information will be shared with SNMP manager. So know the SNMP manager knows the heirerchy of the whole network.

Know if we combine all the above concepts that is ping, traceroute and MIB, you will see the bigger picture of how the a NMS determines the hiererchy of a LAN.

Hope it clears your doubt and helps you :)