Cisco Technology, Inc.

Clare Chu

Mehryar Khalili Garakani

Kenneth Earl Mueller, Ii

Stephen I Schleimer

A method and apparatus that provide for determining a multilayer switching path are disclosed. In one embodiment of the invention, a Layer 3 path and a Layer 2 path between a source device and destination device are first determined in order to identify the relevant switch engines that perform the multilayer switching. Determining whether the switch engines satisfy a set of criteria identifies the relevant switch engines.

Method and apparatus for determining a multilayer switching path

A method and apparatus that provide for a Layerpath determination are disclosed. In one embodiment of the invention, a Layerpath between a source device and destination device is first determined in order to identify contiguous pairs of Layerdevices. A subpath is then determined for each contiguous pair of Layerdevices based on VLAN and spanning tree information associated with the contiguous pair. The Layerpath is a concatenation of the subpaths of all the contiguous pairs in the Layerpath.

Method and apparatus for determining a layer 2 path in a switched network

A method and apparatus are provided for representing abstract network management policies and processing such policies to resolve conflicts. In one aspect, the invention provides a method of managing a network according to a plurality of network management policies, comprising the steps of storing each of the policies as a constraint that comprises one or more variables, a set of possible values, and a set of restrictions on the values that the variables can simultaneously take; storing one or more collective constraints, in which at least one of the constraints is that none of the variables may interfere with one another; applying a constraint satisfaction algorithm to the stored variables, values, restrictions, to create zero or more solutions and checking the solution set against the collective constraints; identifying a conflict in the policies when zero solutions are created and when one or more of the instance or collective constraints is violated; and resolving the conflict by modifying one or more of the variables, values or restrictions. Using a collective constraint representation, policy conflicts are rapidly identified and resolved. Resolution may be accomplished simply by adding a constraint that defines a change in a variable, value, or restriction or redefining the collective constraints.

Representing and verifying network management policies using collective constraints

A method and system for filtering and acting upon data are provided. The specific identity, behavior and relationship between the various components that make up the system are not fixed at compile time. Rather, flexibility is maintained by establishing the identity, behavior and relationships based on configuration data at run time. At run time, various source, filter and action modules that are specified in configuration data are loaded into dynamic memory and initialized. The publisher-subscriber relationships are then established between the loaded modules based on said configuration data. A user interface is provided which allows a user to specify changes to the publisher-subscriber relationships between the components, or to the initialization arguments of the components. The various components of the system may be implemented as objects that are instances of JAVA classes.

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Fremont, CA, United States of America

Clare Chu