Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Todd L Paul

Michel Guittet

Ashwin Palekar

Bernard D Aboba

Karl Denninghoff

Stephen E Bensley

Narendra C Gidwani

David L Eitelbach

Quentin S Miller

Vishwajith Kumbalimutt

Jorg-Thomas Pfenning

Karl L Denninghoff

A policy server program evaluates one or more policy statements based on the group or groups to which a user belongs as well as other conditions. Each policy statement expresses an implementation of the access policy of the network, and is associated with a profile. The profile contains one or more actions that are to be applied to the user. The policy server program determines the identity of the group or groups to which the user belongs by referencing one or more group attributes contained in a user object which is located in a directory on the network. The user object and its group parameters are established when the user is added to the directory, while a policy statement for a group can be created at any time.

Method of enforcing a policy on a computer network

Aspects of the invention provide methods and architectures for enhancing the reliability of computer appliances and reducing the possibilities that human intervention is necessary in the event of a system failure or failure condition. The provided architecture is extensible and provides a generalized framework that is adaptable to many different types of computer appliances. One aspect of the invention provides a boot up redundancy component to ensure that a computer appliance can be appropriately booted. In the described embodiment the appliance hard drive is configured with multiple partitions that can be utilized to boot the appliance thereby reducing the chances that the appliance will not boot. In addition, an architecture is disclosed that comprises one or more resource monitoring components that monitor an associated appliance resource for a failure condition. The resource monitoring components are programmed to attempt to remedy certain failure conditions that they detect. An appliance monitoring service is also provided and is programmed to attempt to remedy failure conditions that are not remedied by one or more of the resource monitoring objects.

Automated recovery of computer appliances

Aspects of the invention provide methods and architectures for enhancing the reliability of computer appliances and reducing the possibilities that human intervention is necessary in the event of a system failure or failure condition. The provided architecture is extensible and provides a generalized framework that is adaptable to many different types of computer appliances. One aspect of the invention provides a boot up redundancy component to ensure that a computer appliance can be appropriately booted. In the described embodiment, the appliance hard drive is configured with multiple partitions that can be utilized to boot the appliance thereby reducing the chances that the appliance will not boot. In addition, an architecture is disclosed that comprises one or more resource monitoring components that monitor an associated appliance resource for a failure condition. The resource monitoring components are programmed to attempt to remedy certain failure conditions that they detect. An appliance monitoring service is also provided and is programmed to attempt to remedy failure conditions that are not remedied by one or more of the resource monitoring objects.

Presented is a web-based enterprise management compliant management framework whose back end components are decoupled from the various user interfaces available for accessing the management system. In the Windows environment, the management system of the instant invention is also compliant with the Windows management instrumentation (WMI) requirements. This management system includes WMI providers which implement standard interfaces which decouple all semantic and syntactic checks from the user interface and which provide common error strings, help, etc. to a user regardless of the user interface being used. The providers of the management system of the instant invention store and access data in the active directory. As such, these providers present a customizable user interface which may be based on a user's expertise level and which may be dynamically localized to the user's preferred language. Transaction support is also provided which prevents multiple users from changing the same attributes at the same time through different user interfaces.

Back-end decoupled management model and management system utilizing same

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Snohomish, WA, United States of America

Todd L Paul