Portable Device for Easy Management and Automatic Recovery of Networking Systems

Abstract

Configure communication equipment is a critical task that typically requires handling advanced concepts aimed at managing and troubleshooting networking issues, thus demanding high analytical and problem-solving skills to ICT technicians. To reduce this gap, this paper presents a portable hardware and software solution devoted to unify the administration of operating systems, configuration files and network services in communication devices. This includes the automatic recovery of firmware under failure conditions concerning the loss of boot image, corruption of Flash memory and forgotten passwords,
among others. The prototype, mainly tested on routers and switches from Cisco and MikroTik, can be also applied to other equipment such as APs, firewalls or embedded devices since it looks for universality and independence from devices and manufacturers. As advantage, this facilitates the easy maintenance
and quick deployment of network infrastructures, thus saving cost and time to engineers. So the experimentation carried out shows the significant advantage concerning the time taken to perform some automated functions rather than running manually. This stands for a powerful tool that, as a result, has been successfully patented and extended through an international cooperation treaty (PCT).