Development of a Proactive Fault Diagnosis for Critical System

Abstract

Large-scale network environments, such as the Internet, are characterized by the presence of various devices connected at various remote locations. There is a scenario of main office connected to different branch offices in another town and cities, with the presence of central administrative system at the main office. Any problem at branches is reported to the main office, due to availability of enough resources there. However, few support tools have been developed to allow the administrators at the central office to remotely control and monitor the computers at the branches.

Even, in local area network environment, diagnosing the computers on the network is always a big problem for the administrator, as he/she moves from one computer to another, running the diagnostic program and collecting report for each machine tested. This is strenuous and time consuming.

To help address these problems, I have employed the concept of mobile agent to design an architecture that can remotely perform various checks and tests on computers on network, and report its findings to the server administrator as central location. This architecture was implemented with Java, using Jini lookup service to establish communication between the computers. The agent tasks were implemented in C programming language.

The result of this research work shows that the use of mobile agent for remote maintenance of computers on network was found to provide an improved, efficient, and dynamic diagnostic management system. All the same, it has proven to be a substantive contributor to efficient network management.