International Business Machines Corporation

Robert Louis Nielsen

Paul Joseph Reder

Wade C Allen

Jeremy P Goodwin

Douglas Toltzman

In an Open System Interconnection (OSI) environment, an agent Common Management Information Protocol (CMIP) platform maintains an up to date tree of all of the Managed Object Instances (MOIs), in order to perform scoping functions. The agent platform receives a message from an OSI manager which includes a base MOI and levels below the base MOI to receive the message. The agent platform recurses through the tree below the base MOI to determine which MOIs should receive the message. If the message is delete, the children of MOIs to be deleted are also deleted. The children of undeletable MOIs are not deleted. A current, accurate tree is maintained by the agent platform, which can register a new MOI in the tree when a valid request is received from the MOI or the manager. The agent platform can also deregister an MOI upon valid request from the agent associated with the platform.

Object independent scoping in an open system interconnection system

Managed Object Instances (MOIs) in a network of OSI computing systems are created, or deleted, without disrupting their interaction with other managed object instances. This is accomplished by a multi-phase commit process operation where in the first phase, a create or delete request is verified, and the CMIP platform places the created or deleted MOI on a pending list in the CMIP platform, along with information identifying the location of the MOI in a hierarchy of MOIs. In the second phase, the object being created or deleted is asked to accept, or reject, the request. The object responds saying that it accepts or rejects the request. If the request is acceptable, the CMIP platform finishes the object's connection to the tree hierarchy, or disconnects the object from the tree. Then the CMIP platform sends back a message to the object to acknowledge the creation of the object, or to tell the object to delete itself. Finally, the CMIP platform sends a request completion message to the manager.

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Zumikon, Switzerland

Robert Louis Nielsen