actual traffic plane, but on what one wants to manage over an mpCP. In general, management over mpCPs is also not restricted to using MO-based protocols (which are designed for short requests, responses, and reports). A number of other, non-MO-based methods are used as well, primarily for configuration of traffic nodes (which is an area where MO-based control of resources may mean too much overhead, or may be too unreliable). For example, Internet management also comprises (besides management over SNMP) the following: Telnet is used for connecting to remote processors. Simple industry standard command line interfaces (CLI) are used for node con- figuration. DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is used for host configuration on LANs. LDAP (Light-weight Directory Access Protocol) is used for configuration via a central server (based on the ITU-T X.500 directory standard) that contains MO information. FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is used for bulk data transfer (or FTAM, in OSI environments). In MO-based mpCPs, there are a number of common LSM events that will exist, depending on the fact that management activities go via MOs. MO instances must be possible to create in an AF, e.g., when a new device is installed on the traffic plane. Consequently, an OSF must also be able to order the removal of MOs from AFs. For all traffic planes of concern, spontaneous events will occur and must be reported from AFs to OFSs for analysis, etc. It may therefore be worthwhile to define a common abstract protocol for mpCPs, based on a number of generic oper- ations. Examples of such protocol specifications are the CMIS/CMIP (defined by ITU-T), SNMP (defined by IETF), and CORBA/GIOP (defined by OMG). To this we could add an AMLn protocol specification based on AML-SAGs, which we will refrain from, however. As Tanenbaum (1996) puts it: "The nice thing with stand- ards is that you have SO many to choose from; furthermore, if you do not like any of them, you can just wait for the next year's model." Such generic operations will depe