Dynamic managed objects for network management

A network management environment with dynamic behaviour can be used as a base for developing a wide range of applications from active networks to "on the fly" customised network management interfaces. This paper presents the dynamic features of the "BaseLayer", a network management tool developed by Machine Intelligence Research Laboratory, University of Ottawa. The dynamic features include the possibilities of adding new managed object (MO) classes without turning down the network management application and of adding new methods and attributes to MOs without turning down the factory servers for those managed objects. The second facility defines the Dynamic Managed Objects (DMOs) that can be changed at runtime by adding new methods and attributes "on the fly". While for adding new managed object classes the Interface Repository (IFR) and the Dynamic Invocation Interface (DII) provided by CORBA were used for DMO implementation a master-shadow server architecture was designed. In the new architecture each DMO factory server has at least 2 processes: a master process, which holds the MO instances and their attributes, and one or more shadow processes, which hold the new added methods.