On Nov 19, 2003, at 1:25 PM, Ian Schorr wrote:
However, Sniffer's Infinistream product is able to capture packets *to
disk* at near- full-duplex gigabit speeds without dropping packets
with what is essentially high-end PC hardware,
...using "patent-pending" technology:
http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/print.php/1452041
"The software is designed to operate at Gigabit speeds and lets users
retrieve and analyze information after it has been written onto a
patent-pending, next-generation disk storage sub-system. Using this
stream-to-disk technology, users are able to reconstruct a Web session,
reproduce a transferred file via the file transfer protocol (FTP)
process, or recreate a previous email without affecting the capture
process."
A search of the US Patent and Trademark Office patent database for
patents assigned to "traxess" found nothing; asking for "traxess" or
"network associates" found 23 patents, but none of NAI's patents
looked, from the title, as if they'd be for anything such as that. (A
bunch of virus-scanning patents, including 6,230,288 "Method of
treating whitespace during virus detection", and some software
installation patents, etc., but that's about it.
Fortunately, patent 6,195,352, "System and method for automatically
identifying and analyzing currently active channels in an ATM
network", doesn't appear to cover heuristically determining the type of
traffic running atop AAL5, which we do - it appears to just cover
heuristically figuring out the AAL type of captured cells. Network
General, the originators of the Sniffer(R) - NG and McAfee Associates
merged to form McAfee General^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HNetwork
Associates - have patent 5,751,698, which appears to cover similar
stuff *and* looking at Q.2931 setup messages to determine circut types.
That appears to be the *only* Network General patent in the USPTO
database....)
BTW:
"Traxess was created and funded by Lindon, Utah-based venture group
Canopy back in January 2001. Canopy hosts a wide portfolio of high-tech
companies. Traxess is currently beta testing the software but expects
the solution to be commercially available in 2003."
Note that the Canopy Group not only have Trolltech (the Qt developers)
under their, umm, canopy, they also have a company somewhat more
infamous in the free software community (hint: their initials are "S",
"C", and "O").