International Business Machines Corporation

John J E Turek

Brian Jay Vetter

German Sergio Goldszmidt

Sebastian Daniel Hassinger

William Walter Hurley, Ii

Steven Cameron Blair

William Meyer Smith

A large distributed enterprise includes computing resources that are organized into one or more managed regions, each region being managed by a management server servicing one or more gateway machines, with each gateway machine servicing a plurality of endpoint machines. A method of diagnosing a fault in such an environment begins by deploying a management infrastructure throughout the computer network, the management infrastructure including a runtime environment at each of the endpoint machines. In response to occurrence of the fault, a software agent is selected, the software agent being executable by the runtime environment at an endpoint machine. The selected software agent is then deployed into the computer network to diagnosis the fault. If the location of the fault is indeterminate, the software agent migrates to the location by gathering information about the fault as it traverses the network.

Mobile agents for fault diagnosis and correction in a distributed computer environment

A routing apparatus is located at an outbound &ldquo;edge&rdquo; of an administrative domain or at an inbound &ldquo;edge&rdquo; of an ISP or other network facility. The apparatus, which is preferably implemented in software, includes a &ldquo;dispatcher.&rdquo; The dispatcher has a database associated therewith in which information about a &ldquo;current state&rdquo; of the network or some resource therein is collected and maintained. The &ldquo;current state&rdquo; information is generally of two types: quality-of-service (Q-o-S) information associated with transactions involving a particular Web server, or more general network resource availability information. According to the invention, a routing &ldquo;policy&rdquo; is defined at the dispatcher using at least one routing rule having a condition and an action. As service requests arrive at the dispatcher, each of the requests is routed to a destination by testing the current state information against the condition.

Service request routing using quality-of-service data and network resource information

A method of validating a request to access a target server in a computer network having an open, trusted database. The method begins when a request to access the target server is received at a host from which the scheme is supported. In response, a query is initiated to the trusted database to identify a technical, administrative or other contact person that may authorize the access request. In the Internet, the trusted database may be the WHOIS database that includes second level domain name information. A second query (e.g., an e-mail) is then launched to the identified contact. The e-mail preferably includes a URL and a key. The URL identifies a response Web page interface that is accessible upon entry of the key. If the identified contact accesses the Web page interface, he or she may then authorize the access request, deny the access request, or indicate under what conditions the request may occur. The invention takes advantage of existing Internet infrastructure and methods to provide a robust lightweight authentication mechanism.

Growing community of inventors

South Nyack, NY, United States of America

John J E Turek