System information

Supported Platforms -
NMIS is written in Perl so theoretically if your toaster runs Perl and has an IP address it
can run NMIS. Nearly all the development of NMIS has taken place on Solaris for Sparc and i386. NMIS
should work on all versions of Unix, and if you have any feedback on how the install went or problems please
let the team know @ [e-mail]
so the team can catch the comments and make some
more permanent changes for future releases.
NMIS is often run on Linux PC platforms but has also been run on higher end Sun Microsystems machines.
Memory is more important then CPU in this case. Performance for polling is dependant on many things but
usually limited by how long it actually takes to poll each device for the required SNMP statistics. Generally
speaking any Pentium II or UltraSparc should be able to manage about 100 to 200 nodes. The faster the
machine the more memory should equal more nodes. This will obviously reach some sort of law of diminishing
returns.
Recommended hardware for 100 nodes (highly conservative, would probably do a few more):
Solaris I386 or Linux (or anything you want to support)
Pentium III 800 Mhz
256 Megs of Memory
20 Gig of disk (cheap)
Fast Ethernet connection to the network.
Browser - The CGI scripts of NMIS have been written with HTML 4.01 and CSS2 W3C
recommendations in
mind. NMIS in general relies heavily on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so some of the older browsers do not
work quite write, for example Netscape 4.x do not render the web pages properly and look quite terrible. NMIS
has been tested with the following Windows browsers:
Internet Explorer 5.x
Netscape 6.x
Opera 5.11
NMIS attempts to be fully validated HTML but does not promise to comply completely at present due to the
large amount of HTML embedded in the CGI scripts.
Why?
Why write yet another piece of Network Management Software? Simple, most Network Management Software
does one thing, focuses on an element from the OSI Network Mangement Reference Model
. This means that
you end up with lots of different bits of software running, all of them polling the network and they all have to be
integrated. NMIS is trying to meet the requirements of several functional areas from the OSI network
management model.
At the moment this is Performance Management and Fault Management and a little Configuration
Management. That is why NMIS was written, to fill in the gaps and provide one system which will meet a large
number requirements and functions of network management. NMIS is also aiming to be proactive, provide
reporting and give the status of the network "at a glance fashion".
The at a glance is a dashboard of the network with operational status of all network devices and the groups
which those devices belong to. NMIS could be considered an API for network management, get the polling
engine to collect and monitor, using RRDTool as the database, then access this information in any way you like
to display status, statistics, etc.
NMIS - Network Management Information System http://www.sins.com.au/nmis/
3 of 43 15/04/2002 3:59 PM