Cisco Technology, Inc.

Biren Fondekar

Kui Zhang

Babak Nader

Christopher Cook

A network verification tool is presented that allows a user to easily create tasks for a collection of task types. The collection of task types are hosted by probe network devices that are coupled to a network under test. The network under test includes network devices executing generic network software and particular hardware or software that is being tested. The probe network devices are coupled to an NVT server, which transmits tasks to the task types and interfaces with one or more NVT clients. The NVT clients can create tasks by entering the appropriate parameters within templates supplied by the NVT server. Any collection of task types can be included in the network verification tool, including traffic generators, traffic analyzers, large network emulators, session emulators, device queries and script tasks.

Network verification tool

According to an embodiment of the present invention, a router is converted into a bulk call generator which generates packets with Internet protocol (IP) addresses for the purpose of simulating network traffic. These packets are initially either captured or created. When the packets are captured, they are captured from actual network traffic and rerouted to various selected IP addresses which are used for simulation purposes. Alternatively, when the packets are created, they are created within the converted router and various selected IP addresses, reserved for simulation purposes, are assigned to the packets. The various selected IP addresses may be in a range which is user configurable. The IP addresses may be selected from this range by any method, such as incrementation, decrementation, or random selection. Connections are set up according to a routing table based on the IP addresses of the various data packets.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Biren Fondekar