The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Aug. 04, 1998
Filed:
Nov. 20, 1995
George Henry Ahrens, Jr, Pflugerville, TX (US);
Arun Chandra, Austin, TX (US);
Conrad William Schneiker, Tucson, AZ (US);
International Business Machines Corporation, Armonk, NY (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for determining the availability of a workstation in a distributed network. Availability is determined using an Availability Measurement System having a Downtime unit, an Availability Disable unit, and a Calculation unit. During the initialization of the workstation, a heartbeat monitor daemon is created to store, at predetermined time intervals, timestamps of the network. Once the workstation becomes unavailable, the recording of the timestamps ceases, thus, allowing an accurate representation of when the workstation became unavailable. Upon the return of the workstation to the status of available, the Downtime unit reads the current time of the network and the stored timestamp to calculate the duration of the unavailability of the workstation. The duration is then stored for later calculation of availability of the workstation for a defined interval of time using the Calculation unit. The Availability Measurement System may be disabled using the Availability Disable unit, thus, allowing selected durations of unavailability to be excluded from an availability calculation.