Riverbed Technology, Inc.

Opnet Technologies, Inc.

Krishnan Sivaramakrishna Iyer

James Mark Shaw

Jerrold Stiffler

James Roberson

Embodiments provide systems, methods, and computer program products for network management application to automatically determine a session prompt for a network device and perform error handling. After logging in to a network device, the network management application records the first session prompt response. The network management application sends a series of empty carriage returns and random characters and records the session prompt responses. The network management application compares the responses and determines whether the prompt is a static or a dynamic prompt based on the results. The network management application elicits error responses from the network device by sending additional random characters and records the results in an error handling dictionary. The error handling dictionary is used later when running user-provided commands, enabling a determination of whether a command executed successfully.

Automatic prompt detection for universal device support

An access discovery method and system discovers and stores the proper access protocol for each device on a network. The discovery process includes progressively sequencing through state transitions until a successful access protocol sequence is determined, and an access script corresponding to this sequence is stored for subsequent access to the device. Preferably, the protocol-discovery algorithm is modeled as a state table that includes a start state and two possible terminal states: success and failure. A state machine executes the state table until a terminal state is reached; if the terminal state is a failure, the system backtracks to attempt an alternative sequence. The process continues until the success state is reached or until all possible sequences are executed without success. An exemplary state model is provided that has been shown to be effective for modeling network devices from a variety of vendor devices.

Automatic access to network devices using various authentication schemes

A method and/or system is configured to improve the results of an auto-detection of network devices based on the causes of detection failures in preceding runs of the auto-detection process. As each device that is believed to be in the network is found to be undiscovered, the identification of the device and information regarding the cause(s) of non-discovery are stored. Prior to the next auto-detection run, one or more of the discovery parameters are modified, based on the causes associated with the undiscovered devices. The extent to which the discovery parameters are modified is preferably based on the apparent stability of the network, or upon the detection of changes to the network.

Growing community of inventors

Cary, NC, United States of America

Krishnan Sivaramakrishna Iyer