International Business Machines Corporation

David S Ludovici

Frank V Paxhia

Mark J Melville

Richard A Mullock

A single point of control is provided for all IPSec tunnels and also for VPN connections at a node within a virtual private network. The control of the connections include the ability to start and stop manual and dynamic VPN connections, to delete connections that might have had errors associated with them, to query VPN connection status information on these connections, to manage such things as connection lifetimes, and the refresh of keying material, that is the re-negotiation of dynamic Security Associations (SAs), and to create VPN connections when this system is acting in a responder role, that is the opposite endpoint of an initiated connection.

System and method for central management of connections in a virtual private network

System and method for serving HTML pages to web browsers for the purpose of administration and configuration. A plurality of instances of WWW servers is provided, with one such instance including a configuration file which is restricted in usage and not alterable by way of any HTML configuration or administration forms. This plurality of instances of internet connection servers is managed by way of a web browser which displays and interacts with a plurality of HTML forms and corresponding common gateway interface binary programs which are provided selectively for creating and deleting instances of servers, associating a configuration file with a server instance, changing server instance start up parameters, and starting, ending, and restarting server instances.

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Owego, NY, United States of America

David S Ludovici