Digital Equipment Corp has added 20 new or enhanced products, services and partnerships to its Polycenter schema for enterprise computing management, as reported briefly (CI No 1,904). Particularly interesting are a load of nips and tucks to its DECmcc network management application, and v1.2 adds 12 new or improved management modules. Also, the company has opened up the DECmcc system to software-smiths to write functional modules on top of it. Up until now, development tools have been restricted to those writing code for interfacing network kit to the network management system, but version 1.2 allows developers to add new end-user functions to the code. Meanwhile at the low end, DEC has acknowledged the difficulties of producing bespoke interfaces to everything in the shape of a Data Collector Access Module that is designed to link unknown device types into the management scheme. The other additions to DECmcc include new notification filters that enable system managers to tailor the type of alerts that they receive and autoconfiguration of TCP/IP, DECnet and FDDI nodes. Circuits now appear as manageable objects and the company has added a module that automatically discovers attached network nodes to build topology tables. At present however, this feature works only with DECNet Phase IV and DECNet OSI devices. Version 1.2 also appears on Ultrix for the first time, although the VMS and Unix-derivative versions are not identical. The former, for example, includes a terminal server access module, which the latter lacks. Nonetheless, the DECmcc Unix Distributed Management extends Network Application Support to Unix for the first time, and managing TCP/IP-based networks is aided by an SNMP-based performance analyser and a TCP/IP ‘assistant’ that diagnoses common problems with the the protocol. The company has also picked up Technically Elite Concepts Inc’s Net/Pod – a low-level network analyser which enables DECmcc operators to determine local area network usage patterns and detect network problems before they lead to failures; the combination monitors local and remote segments simultaneously. There are new DECinspect network security management products for security analysis and reporting on a network of VMS, Ultrix and SunOS systems. The 2.2 release of DECinspect Compliance Manager is enhanced for VMS and adds Ultrix and SunOS support. The new DECinspect Intrusion Detector for VMS 1.0 is designed to challenge hackers by detecting, tracking and invoking countermeasures against suspicious and hostile activities in real time.