Following a practical example, this paper has described the necessary steps for building distributed cooperative CORBA-compliant management objects from an existing SNMP agent implementation. The approach represents a flexible and systematic methodology for the re-engineering of already existing management agents. Three critical factors for a successful migration were identified:
Several encountered difficulties have their origin in the fact that
currently available CORBA development toolkits lack implementations of
already standardized generic services (currently, more than a eighteen
CORBAservices have been adopted by the OMG). We believe that a very
large part of our manual enhancements w.r.t. generic management
functionality may be dropped when CORBA implementations become more
mature.
The suitability of CORBA for systems and application management
purposes could be demonstrated even if performance and scalability
issues make its current use in very large environments prohibitive:
This is due to the fact that the interface repositories are
implemented as flat files which need to be exported and/or mounted
via the Network File System (NFS).
At the current stage of the project, the descriptive power of modern
OOA/OOD methodologies has been applied only to static aspects of
distributed systems. Further steps consist in analyzing and modeling
dynamic properties of distributed systems like data and control flows.