Case Project 15-3 Now that the insurance company has complete records of all its
ID: 3772818 • Letter: C
Question
Case Project 15-3
Now that the insurance company has complete records of all its assets, you suggest gathering and storing configuration information for every piece of hardware and software on the network. One way to accomplish this would be to visit every workstation, server, and connectivity device and write down their configuration information. To save time and ensure accuracy, you suggest using a configuration management software designed to retrieve this information automatically and store it centrally. You also want an application that can push changes in con- figurations to all the switches or routers on your network at once. Research the capabilities of configuration management applications. What additional functions would be desirable for your network? How might the configuration management database be connected to the asset management database? Name at least two configuration management applications that would suit your company’s needs.
Explanation / Answer
Answer :
The management applications that i would suggest for this type of configuration are Travelling Salesman Problem Configuaration and dijkstra's problem.This is a problem in combinatorial optimization studied in operations research and theoretical computer science. Given a list of work stations and servers and their pair wise distances, the task is to find a shortest possible tour that visits each work stations and servers exactly once being optimal.In detail this could be explained as the travelling salesman problem is one of known problem in computers courses all time.The way of stating this problem is that given a list of work stations and servers in our case and their pairwise distances, the task is to find the shortest possible route that visits each work stations and servers exactly once and then returns to the origin work stations and servers. The wise solution solves the problem in O(n) time, simply by checking all possible routes and selecting the shortest one. These times are given using Big O notation, which is commonly used in computer's course to show the efficiency of a solution.
The next one is dijkstra's problem which can be used in detail as dijkstra's can be essentially uses breadth first search with greedy approach to come up with the shortest distance between given two work stations and servers.
Let the work stations or servers at which we are starting be called the initial work stations or servers. we define the distance of workstations or servers 'Y' as the distance from the initial work stations or servers to work stations or servers 'Y'. Dijkstra's algorithm will assign some initial distance values and will try to improve them step by step.
1. Assign to every work stations or servers a distance value: set it to zero for our initial work stations or servers and to infinity for all other work stations or servers.
The starting work stations or servers is at distance 0 from itself and other work stations or servers are unreachable.
2. Set the initial work stations or servers as current. Mark all other work stations or servers unvisited. Create a set of all the unvisited work stations or servers called the unvisited set.
3. For the current work stations or servers, consider all of its unvisited neighbors and calculate their distances. Compare the newly calculated tentative distance to the current assigned value and assign the smaller one.
4. When we are done considering all of the neighbors of the current workstation, mark the current workstation as visited and remove it from the unvisited set. A visited workstation will never be checked again.
5. If the destination workstation has been marked visited or if the smallest tentative distance among the workstations in the unvisited set is infinity then stop. The problem will be completed
6. select the unvisited workstation that is marked with the smallest distance, set it as the new current workstation and go back to step 3.