Patent ID: 7877369

Claim:
An apparatus for hosted searching of different private local area network (LAN) information comprising: a LAN crawler to automatically and repeatedly crawl a LAN having a plurality of devices, said LAN crawler including, a collection module to attempt to collect, from across each of a plurality of disparate information sources stored in the plurality of devices, only those parts of the disparate information sources that include descriptive information of a first plurality of items of interest, wherein for at least one of the first plurality items of interest, the parts are collected from multiple ones of the plurality of disparate information sources, and a reporting module to automatically report the collected information organized according to the first plurality of items of interest out of a firewall of the private LAN being crawled and over the Internet; and a hosted on-demand search system to be coupled to the Internet including, a set of one or more centralized-search servers including, a crawler interface to receive the reports of different instances of the LAN crawler deployed on a plurality of different private LANs at least some of which are operated by different entities, a database interface to create and synchronize a separate private search database for each of the plurality of private LANs based on the received reports, wherein each of the private search databases includes the collected information collected from across the disparate information sources of that private LAN organized by the first plurality of items of interest, and wherein the private search databases are not organized by documents located on the plurality of private LANs, a server user interface module to provide a user interface over the Internet to each of the plurality of private LANs to perform private searches of their corresponding private search database, and a configuration database coupled to the server user interface module to store authentication information for access by the user interfaces and search queries; wherein the descriptive information of the first plurality of items of interest include technical information regarding the plurality of private LANs, users of the plurality of private LANs, and the plurality of devices of the plurality of private LANs; wherein the plurality of disparate information sources include 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.