Software Tools Developed by CNL
| OpenRSM: a lightweight integrated open source remote management solution |
| MANTIS: Optical Network Planning and Operation Tool |
| MONOCRaT: IT systems management software |
OpenRSM: a lightweight integrated open source remote management solution
OpenRSM is a lightweight, open source tool for remote management of workstations. It extends and integrates high-value open source projects in order to provide an integrated management platform. The goal has been to build a remote systems and network management platform capable to facilitate daily tasks. The system is designed to be fully functional yet simple, unlike most commercial management systems.
OpenRSM is designed to offer:
- Inventory and assets management: information retrieval about installed assets
- Remote control: real time control of the graphical environment of the managed stations
- Software delivery: management of installed software. Supports user-interactive and silent installations/uninstallation among other
- Remote procedure call: sending executable commands to stations
- Network monitoring
- Reporting and usage statistics
The OpenRSM system is composed by the OpenRSM server, the user management interface, and the agents. The management console accepts user input and conveys it to the server. The server is responsible for business logic enforcement and action coordination. The agent is the passive component that resides on managed stations. It accepts administrative commands from the server alone. The figure below presents the general system architecture.
It is offered to the IT community as open source hosted at http://openrsm.sourceforge.net . The server tier is composed of the integration server front-end, the web and the database servers. The servers can be installed in centralized or distributed configurations. OpenRSM proxy modules have also been developed in order to bring control to hidden network segments or to provide management traffic routing. The server communicates with the agents so that no ports are held listening at the agent end. Special networking techniques have been employed for this purpose. Communication is practically agent-initiated and thus agents remain inactive and invulnerable to network scans and attacks. Moreover, only the minimum number of ports are held open. The agent system is released in many flavours; they can be installed as a system service, as a console application, as a background process and as a graphical application. Platforms supported include windows and most *nix platforms. The agent and the OpenRSM server have been tested and proved to scale well for several tens of thousands of jobs.
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MANTIS: Optical Network Planning and Operation Tool
MANTIS is a network planning and operation tool for core transport optical networks. MANTIS receives as input a number of optical network characteristics (e.g., topology, node architecture, type of fiber and equipment) and then the user is able to select among a large set of algorithms for routing and wavelength (RWA) assignment, routing and spectrum allocation for gridless/spectrum-flexible networks, for impairment awareness, for equipment placement, such as regenerators, transponders, monitors and other and for protection and failure handling. In general, many of the corresponding problems are NP-Complete, that is, the number of operations required to solve them is non-polynomial with the size of the input problem, mainly due to the large number of variables and constraints associated with these problems. To address this issue, MANTIS employs high efficient and innovative heuristics.
MANTIS can be used as a researchers’ tool for developing and evaluating, under common conditions, new algorithms for the optical network’s domain. MANTIS can also be used by equipment vendors when evaluating their devices and by network operators when designing or extending their network, as a mean to increase clients’ satisfaction and decrease CAPEX (Capital expenditure) and OPEX (Operational expenditure) related costs.
MONOCRaT: IT systems management software
Monocrat is an IT system management solution targeting tiny (~10), small (~50) and medium (~200) networks of machines. These networks are encountered in thousands around the world: in small companies no matter their business, in computer labs, in hotels, in hospitals, everywhere. Monocrat can also scale easily in order to handle the administration of even larger networks, consisting of thousands (< 10000) of machines that require basic management operations.
Monocrat philosophy is to be simple and lightweight making the administration of networks of machines a "piece of cake" for everyone, while providing all the necessary IT system management features.
Monocrat consists of three components: Monocrat Manager provides a graphical (web and application) user interface for the discovery and management of remote machines, defining and assigning "jobs". Monocrat Server is responsible for passing the Manager's commands ("jobs") to the Monocrat Agents and for receiving and processing the Agents' responses. The is also the Monocrat Server Services configuration UI. Monocrat Agents run in the administered machines and execute the "jobs" received by the Server.
MONOCRaT Manager