monitor and change settings on the network. Because of this many vendors have not implemented the SET command, so that Summarising, the greatest advantage of SNMP compared to CMIP is its simplicity. The standard was developed relatively under these circumstances SNMP is reduced mainly to being a network monitoring tool. CMIP, together with ACSE, provides quickly, and it is easy and quick to implement. This accounts for its powerful security capabilities. wide popularity. However, as the complexity of networks and de- CMIP can specify multiple operations within a single request, vices grow, the protocol is called upon to perform a management function which it was not originally designed to do, and its limita- and CMIP operations can be specified to be on a best effort basis or on an atonomic basis, i.e. if all the operations cannot tions are becoming evident. be carried out then none are done and an error is returned. CMIP, on the other hand, is a powerful and complex protocol, SNMP can only work on one object at a time, so that the which has been developed with future expandability very much in mind; it has been a long time in defining within the various stand- concept of best effort does not arise. CMIP allows a single request to retrieve large amounts of data ards bodies. Because of its complexity it needs more memory and more processing power than SNMP and is more complex to design from managed objects, by having information sent back from to and to test against, for conformance. the objects in multiple linked replies. SNMP does not allow linked replies, SO it is limited in the volume of information which can be obtained from a single request. It is therefore inefficient when a large amount of information is to be re- 16.10 Bibliography trieved. SNMP cannot, for example, retrieve or alter a table of N rows in less than N request/response pairs. Adiarous, S.E., Proudfood, D.A. and Dam, X.N. (1990) Service 5. CMIP allows for powerful conditional commands, via scoping management in Intelligent Networks, IEEE Netw