3Com Corp, San Jose, California is the latest company to focus attention on network management to the desktop. The company is using the technology to try to maintain its position in the ever more competitive Ethernet adaptor market. The product in question, LinkWatch, is an SNMP system for personal computers that is claimed to use significantly less memory than other approaches. 3Com claims to have taken taken the innovative tack of pulling most of the intelligence back to the file server where it runs as a NetWare Loadable Module. As a result, the company says that the personal computer plays host to between 1Kb and 3Kb of code when using NetWare ODU drivers or less than 6k when using standard NDIS drivers. In fact, what the company has produced is a useful SNMP gateway: the personal computer and the softhub NetWare Loadable Module talk their own proprietary language and the softhub then acts to redirect properly formed standard messages to and from any SNMP management station that you care to name. The package as a whole includes manageable NetWare and NDIS drivers for use with 3Com’s EtherLink adaptors and the SoftHub/NLM. Its claimed to work with any MIB-2 management system, including Sun’s SunNet Manager, Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView, Novell’s NMS, or 3Com’s Isoview. On the other hand it will only work with 3Com Etherlink adaptors. The claims for LinkWatch suggest that it provides a good degree of management, particularly at adaptor board level where a variety of network traffic stats can be captured. Statistics about the personal computer are more limited – restricted to information gleaned on machine configuration and information held in four user-defined fields. LinkWatch is $400 per licence and is available immediately. 3Com is currently waiting to see what the IEEE and ANSI committees will make of its proposals for a CMOL Common Management Over Link layer personal computer agent. Should it be approved, 3Com says CMOL drivers, taking up marginally more memory, will appear.
