Summary

---

It is becoming harder to draw the line between system management and network management because there are frequent overlaps where the precise responsibility is very hard to determine. Although the system manager is not being responsible for the health of the network, he must put in place sufficient monitoring of his systems to ensure, as far as possible, that connectivity is maintained and the network response times are acceptable to his customers.

Big Brother is a system and network monitoring tool that is freely available, although it is normally sufficient only for relatively small networks. It is a useful product because it identifies problems and records information, but it does not have the capability to take remedial action if a threshold is exceeded. To do this, a more comprehensive management product, such as Solstice Domain Manager, is required.

The system manager needs to determine the network capacity and the current load before trying to add more nodes. He can provide firm evidence if a network segment appears to be overloaded and can meet with the network manager to resolve the problem, possibly by creating a number of subnetworks so that the network traffic is restricted to a smaller proportion of the hosts .

Troubleshooting is a significant part of the system manager's job. The system manager must possess sufficient knowledge about the systems and the network tools available to him. Basic commands such as ifconfig , ping , netstat , traceroute , and snoop are all provided as part of the Solaris operating environment. A further useful command is lsof , which is freely available in the public domain.

---

Top