Subject: Heartbeat between Router and 3rd party box

From: Voreniza S <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 04:15:32 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,

I need to design a heartbeat  mechanism between our Router and a 3rd party device, that supports IP stack.

The intent is to develop software that monitor the general health of the box by receiving/ and or sending  regular keepalives. 

What is the best way to approach this problem ? Any standard protocol that would enable me to hook into ? [ with least processing & most efficiency] . 

Worst case, the SNMP mibs at the 3rd part device could be polled periodically . [but this is not performance friendly]

Thanks,

Voreniza

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 07:23:06 -0700

At 04:15 AM 8/18/2002 -0700, Voreniza S wrote:
>The intent is to develop software that monitor the general health of the 
>box by receiving/ and or sending  regular keepalives.

have you considering pinging the device? Is there some specific process 
that you want to poll, or just maintain IP connectivity?

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From: Vernon Schryver <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:16:12 -0600 (MDT)

> To: Voreniza S <[email-masked]>

> that you want to poll, or just maintain IP connectivity?

The simplest, most direct, and most accurate tactic seems to me to be
snooping on the routing traffic that the box sends.  Since the box
was described as a "Router," why not set up a BGP session to it or
snoop on its RIP, IGRP, or OSPF traffic?  If it is more than one hop
away so that its RIP etc. broadcasts or multicasts won't be heard,
why not configure it to unicast them to the monitoring box?

The software to listen to the routing traffic could be any of the
open source, freely distributable implementations of the relevant
protocol(s) on a UNIX-like system.  (Well, that might be a problem
for IGRP; so don't use IGRP.)

Vernon Schryver    [email-masked]

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From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Aug 2002 09:15:33 -0700

At 09:16 AM 8/19/2002 -0600, Vernon Schryver wrote:
>snooping on the routing traffic that the box sends.  Since the box was 
>described as a "Router," why not set up a BGP session to it or snoop on 
>its RIP, IGRP, or OSPF traffic.

I think you misunderstood him, or at least I understood him differently. He 
said

>box by receiving/ and or sending  regular keepalives.

Cisco equipment has a similar function. It was originally developed to 
monitor printers and such in IBM network, and has been extended to be used 
for a variety of purposes. Basically, the question before the house is "is 
a given device alive, and if not can someone please be notified?" By 
extension, one might note the loss rate to the device (number of pings sent 
for which no corresponding reply was received), the mean round trip delay, 
or other data.

Cisco's approach is to ping the device - every device that implements IP is 
supposed to implement ICMP, and if ICMP is implemented, ICMP Echo 
Request/Reply should be implemented. One could go on to wonder about SNMP 
or a list of other protocols, if there is specific information to be gained 
(do you want to know, for example, what kind of device it is?). However, it 
seems that ping covers the most cases if only general heartbeat is required.