Managing Your Router With Java
A Framework For Creating Your Own Network Management System
By Michael Norton
Network management systems (NMSs) are excellent resources, but they tend to be a bit pricey. Tools such as HP's OpenView and Cabeltron's Spectrum allow the network administrator to track traffic through specific interfaces based on source, destination, routing protocol, network events, and remote monitors. Although products with fewer features are available at lower prices, in this article, I'll present a framework for crafting your own home-brew NMS. All you need is a router, a router software image that supports an HTTP server, and a Java 1.1 compiler. We'll take a Cisco router and play with its internal operations via the router's HTTP server using Java.
Quite frequently I'm asked, "Why bother to write Java code when the router supports an HTML browser?" The answer is simple: automation of your network and its administration. By using Java to interface with the router's HTTP server, you can collect data on CPU and memory utilization, interface packet counts, and other crucial information on the health of your network. It doesn't matter if your network consists of one router or hundreds. Having automated tools to collect data on the status of your network can be invaluable to proactively managing and expanding your network.
The Basics of Cisco Router Configuration
Before you dive into the operations of how to pass URLs to the router, let's cover the basics of how a router accepts commands.
