Patent ID: 9584367
Date: 2017-02-28
CPC Classifications: H04L

Claim:
1. A method, comprising: discovering, by a network monitoring apparatus, nodes in a network; collecting a list of internet protocol (IP) addresses, media access control (MAC) addresses, domain name system (DNS) names, and sysnames for each of the nodes discovered in the network; comparing, by an IP duplicate detector, the IP addresses of each of the discovered nodes with IP addresses of current nodes and other discovered nodes; comparing, by a MAC duplicate detector, the MAC addresses of each of the discovered nodes with MAC addresses of the current nodes and the other discovered nodes; comparing, by a DNS duplicate detector, the DNS names of each of the discovered nodes with DNS names of the current nodes and the other discovered nodes; comparing, by a name duplicate detector, the sysnames of each of the discovered nodes with sysnames of the current nodes and the other discovered nodes; determining duplicate nodes that are duplicates of the other discovered nodes and/or the current nodes based on the comparison of the IP addresses, MAC addresses, DNS names, and sysnames; assigning a priority to each of the IP duplicate detector, the MAC duplicate detector, the DNS duplicate detector, and the name duplicate detector that determines an order of execution of each of the comparing steps; and assigning a weight to each of the IP duplicate detector, the MAC duplicate detector, the DNS duplicate detector, and the name duplicate detector, wherein the weight indicates a reliability of a result provided by each of the IP duplicate detector, the MAC duplicate detector, the DNS duplicate detector, and the name duplicate detector.