National Taiwan University of Science and Technology

In an amazingly short time, the World Wide Web (WWW) has dramatically affected the dissemination of information regarding many aspects of life, including commerce, education, and so on. The ubiquitous and easy to use Web browser have another important appeal. That is, it is hoped that the Web browser can be used as a universal human computer interface. Especially in the domain of network management, due to the vast varieties of network elements to be managed, a simple and unified management interface is very important. There are three advantages for Web-based network management. First, there is no specialized management software needed to configure or monitor a device. Second, the compatibility and interoperability problem between different versions is eliminated. The next major advantage is that of platform-independence and location-independence for the management applications.

To have the above advantages, we propose a bilingual agent to accept either SNMP or HTTP commands and design several HTML pages to facilitate the task of network management. For network elements that support only SNMP, the bilingual agent can be acted as a proxy, such that the traditional SNMP agent can also be queried through the Web browser. We also define a uniform resource locator format for SNMP commands. This allows various network management application HTML pages to be designed and added whenever needed.