Patent ID: 8472449

Claim:
A system for network packet recording and retrieval comprising: packet collector means operable to receive and concatenate a plurality of data packets and data packet streams for a particular network connection into fixed sized blocks from a monitored network; storage manager means operable to write the blocks to and read the blocks from at least one non-volatile storage device; packet retriever means operable to locate at least one of the data packets and data packet streams in the at least one storage device and subsequently read the located packets from the at least one storage device into memory; and index constructor means for constructing an index that links the data packets of the particular network connection in a connection list by back-chaining the data packets together in reverse sequential order by assigning a first packet of the connection as a tail of the connection list and the last packet of the connection as a head of the connection list and directing a pointer to the head of the connection list.