The crash of the 1980s ould has been avoided if there were network monitoring tools that we have today. During that time, there was no network monitoring tools. It was upon the network administrators to diagnose the network and find for solutions of the network problems they could experience. Back then, there was the use of IMP as routers. These were not as effective in management as when they fail, they did not have a mechanism of informing the network that there was a problem. With large networks, network management becomes a difficult process. Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) comes in handy when managing this type of management possible by using a managing host (Marchette, 2001). With SNMP, it is possible to manage hubs, printers, hosts, and management services like DHCP. It is possible to manage any type of network which has been installed with SNMP agent software. This comes with Windows 2003 server. This software will interact with third party SNMP applications so that they give the required information about the network. With SNMP, you can be able to monitor the performance of a network, you can access the performance of remote devices, and you can even configure remote devices. The design of the SNMP is so that it can have the least interference on the device, should be able to be deployed in the largest network. There are other network management tools which could have helped solve the Arpanet crash of the 1980s. They perform more than the sending of Hello and I heard messages that was performed by line up/down protocol. The protocol lacked other network analysis features like analyzing whether the problem was a hardware or software error (Marchette, 2001).
Some network monitoring tools like intermapper could have helped in the crash. Intermapper is a network monitoring tool that monitors system availability in a variety of methods which includes: SIMPLE PING via SNMP protocol and HTTP, DHCP, DNS and LDAP for specific tasks (Brenton, & Hunt, 2002).
References
Brenton, C & Hunt, C 2002, Mastering network security, John Wiley & Sons, New York.
Marchette, DJ 2001, Computer intrusion detection and network monitoring: A statistical viewpoint, Springer, New York.
