Who to blame when your "smart" appliances do not work

Samsung recently had a data center outage, causing one frustrated
customer of their "smart" TV to reverse engineer why their TV would not
work despite a fully functioning Internet connection:

http://www.sodnpoo.com/posts.xml/spoofing_the_samsung_smart_tv_internet_check.xml

Having a single point of failure for your "smart" appliance may be just
an inconvenience in the case of TV service, but likely would have bigger
repercussions for energy, health, food, industrial and defense sectors.

MIMIC Web Simulator is particularly suited to simulate scenarios for
disaster recovery. Debug your web services applications before your
customers have to.

MIMIC Simulator 14.00 released

We are happy to announce the immediate availability of
MIMIC Simulator Suite  14.00.

More details at

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/mimic-simulator-14-00-introduces-100000154.html

OSPF network simulated with MIMIC SNMP Simulator

FYI, we have released a network in the MIMIC Network Library with 98 routers
connected by OSPF routing tables. To show interoperability with third-party software,
this simulated network was discovered by traversing the SNMP agents, and visualized
by the open-source OSPFVIZ tool, shown below.

Once you reduce distances from a selected node, you can visualize sub-areas, for
example this shows nodes at distance 3 and less from the top node:

This shows CA SPECTRUM topology of the same network:

And Avaya VPFM:

MIMIC controlling multiple simulators

With MIMIC, you can control an unlimited number of SNMP agent simulations
in different ways.

The attached picture shows different ways of MIMICView controlling
multiple MIMIC simulators (as indicated in each title bar):

1) top left, it controls the MIMICD running on localhost with 98 agents.
Notice they are all running (green), and some activity to one of the
agents (agent 76).

2) bottom left, it controls a MIMICD running on another box on same LAN.
Notice a different set of agents, all stopped (red).

3) top right, a MIMICView running on local system controls a MIMICD
running on AWS instance. Notice the different version 13.20, and different
agents in different states.

4) bottom right, a MIMICView running on AWS instance is displaying on
local X server.

MIMIC Simulator Helps Pepco Identifying and preparing for Crisis Situations

Pepco Holdings, Inc. is one of the largest energy delivery companies in the
Mid-Atlantic region, serving about 2 million customers in Delaware, the District
of Columbia, Maryland and New Jersey.

PHI uses various network management platforms (NMS) to manage their large
production network. The engineers managing the network need to configure
it to handle all issues and failures. This is a complicated task considering that
there are new challenges appearing everyday. They needed a way to create all
those problem scenarios in the test lab so they can configure NMS
appropriately and train the engineers to identify the root cause of those
problems. It was not practical for them to have a test environment to be of the
same size as the production network. That made the task of recreating
problems not only hard but many times impossible. To reconstruct the daily
issues of a scalable product network, PHI decided to supplement their NOC
environment with thousands of simulated devices, using MIMIC SNMP
Simulator.

MIMIC enables PHI engineers to setup a scalable simulated network with
10,000 devices. They simulate different combinations of routers, switches,
firewalls, WLAN controllers from many different manufacturers.

More details at our site.

“MIMIC Simulator is a powerful tool that is easy to use. Because it has the
ability to capture all the different SNMP versions, it minimizes the number
of devices that need to be purchased saving money and lab space. “
Albert Jennings
PHI NOC Engineer

MIMIC SNMP Simulator and HP NNMi

This shows a small simulated network of 250 SNMP agents simulated with
MIMIC SNMP Simulator discovered by HP Network Node Manager.

MIMIC simulated devices from different vendors and types.
We have posted some of the images here.

In these images you can see that NNMi has discovered all the
devices and is displaying a nice topology of various routers
and switches. You can drill down and see the detailed device
configuration.

You can also see that it is graphing counters at real-time and they
are increasing at a predictable rate set by MIMIC Simulator. It is
very easy to create variations in counters using the MIMIC GUI or
a script.

MIMIC SNMP Simulator: MPLS network discovered by CA Spectrum

This post describes a network available for download in
 MIMIC SNMP Simulator's network library: a Juniper network in  an
MPLS configuration.

The MPLS topology diagrams show 3 MPLS networks, red, green and
blue, with all MPLS instances discovered by CA Technologies' Spectrum.

Each of the PE routers serves multiple MPLS network points of presence.
For example, R2 hosts the red and blue VRFs as well as the green VPLS.
Each MPLS instance is indexed by a different SNMP community string.
The VPLS topology includes 1 MPLS VPLS; the mBGP VPN topology
includes 2 MPLS VPNs.