3com Corporation

Other

David John Maxwell

Jonathan G G Tams

Ronald Brown

Robert Duncan

Peter Richard Bailey

David Anthony Hawking

Mark A Pearce

Jonathan Tams

Paul Sandie

Stephen Kitt

Neil E Harrison

Steven James Urouhart

Mike Moran

Representative embodiments disclose mechanisms to complete partial natural language questions. Users enter a partial question. The system comprises a plurality of indexes, one index comprising common phrases associated with natural language questions and other indexes comprising short text entries associated with documents, such as document titles. The partial question is used to search one or more of the indexes. The search yields a ranked list of results. The top k entries of the list are selected and one or more language models are created from the top k entries. Each language model comprises n-grams from the top k entries from an index and an associated probability for each n-gram. A question completion generator creates question completion suggestions by matching n-grams with the partial question, removing ungrammatical candidate suggestions, and filtering the remaining suggestions per a filtering criteria. The top N results are returned as suggestions to complete the question.

Corpus specific natural language query completion assistant

The gateway devices in a VPN require configuration when the VPN is set up and to reflect changes. To process the configuration tasks efficiently, a method is described of configuring a virtual private network (VPN) within a shared network, in which a queue of configuration tasks is created for gateway devices belonging to the VPN. The configuration tasks include sending static network routing information to said gateway devices. The tasks are deployed by retrieving a next task from the queue, and interrogating the gateway device to which the task relates, to identifying any change in subnetworks connected thereto since the task was created. If no change is identified, the retrieved task is performed. If, on the other hand, a change is identified, update configuration tasks are created for all relevant gateway devices in the VPN. The update task for each gateway device is then merged with any not yet performed task in the queue for that gateway device, and the task retrieved from the queue merged with the and update task is performed.

Configuration of VPNs

Ingress to egress network traffic ratios are determined for at least some devices within a network and server-like devices are selected on the basis of the determined ratios or a figure derived from the determined ratios. Selecting the server-like devices includes the step of selecting those devices having a value of ratio above a selected value and includes ranking the devices in order of their ratios and determining discontinuities in the values of the ratios of the ranked devices. The server-like devices are connected to a port of another device and the ingress to egress network traffic ratio is determined by determining the network traffic through the port using SNMP.

Apparatus, method, and computer program for detection of server-like devices on a computer network based on ingress to egress network traffic ratios

In a computer network of devices, at least some of the devices (i.e. the DCHP devices) have a static (e.g. MAC) address which does not change over time and a dynamic (e.g. IP) address which may change over time. There is disclosed a method and computer program for mapping the static address and dynamic address for the devices comprising polling said devices using said IP addresses and during said polling determining the MAC addresses of the devices, and providing a set of mapped static and dynamic addresses, said method including repeating the steps of the method at intervals. Using the method of the invention, it is possible, when entering a particular conversation in a database, to access the IP addresses, to determine which is the current DHCP device that address maps to, and assign the conversation to that device and store it in the database assigned to that device. Therefore, for each DHCP device, one can store a history of the conversations or traffic involved in that device.

Tracking dynamic addresses on a network

Methods and apparatus for collecting, storing, processing and using data, such a RMON2 network traffic data, are described. Network traffic probes are identified and attempts are made to configure the identified probes to generate network traffic data sets which are as close to a preselected common data format as possible. Application layer traffic data is collected in addition to network layer traffic data when possible. In an RMON2 embodiment, the common data format includes the use of delta count values as opposed to absolute count values. The common data format of the present invention utilizes terminal count mode format as opposed to all count mode format for the presentation of RMON2 application layer information. To minimize the amount of data processing required to put a probe's network traffic data into the desired common format and to maximize the amount of information collected, network data is obtained from a probe using one of the available RMON2 table formats. The utilized format is selected in the following order of preference: alMatrixTopN(Terminal Mode), alMatrixTopN(AllMode), alMatrix, nlMatrixTopN and nlMatrix.

Methods and apparatus for collecting, storing, processing and using network traffic data

Growing community of inventors

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

David John Maxwell