Patent ID: 8285705

Claim:
An apparatus for hosted searching of different private local area network (LAN) information comprising: a LAN crawler deployed on a plurality of private LANs, each private LAN having a plurality of devices, the LAN crawler including: a collection module for collecting, from the plurality of devices of each of the plurality of private LANs, information of a first plurality of items of interest, and a reporting module to report the collected information from each of the plurality of private LANs, and a hosted on-demand search system including a search server having a processor coupled to a memory including: a crawler interface to receive a report from the reporting module, a database interface to maintain a private database for each of the plurality of private LANs, wherein each private database includes the collected information of its corresponding private LAN organized by the first plurality of items of interest, a user interface module to permit a user on each private LAN to search the corresponding private database, and a configuration database to store authentication information for user access to the user interface module; wherein the information of a first plurality of items of interest is obtained from the group consisting of a routing table of a router, a router configuration file of a router, an address resolution protocol (ARP) table of a switch, a bridging table of a switch, a switch configuration table of a switch, a software configuration file of a server, a resource utilization counter of a server, a log file of a server, custom application file of a server, user information of a directory server, group information of a directory server, a software configuration file of a workstation, a registry of a workstation, an operating system interface database of a workstation, a directory of a workstation, a resource utilization counter of a workstation, a log file of a workstation, and a configuration file of a network printer.