Patent ID: 8873377

Claim:
A device comprising: a chassis with a backplane, the backplane including a bus, a database card, and a plurality of physical slots that accommodate other cards, the other cards including, a master control card to perform control plane processing, when performing the control plane processing, the master control card is to: receive a particular control packet from a source device, and a backup control card, the database card being connected to the bus without being accommodated by one of the plurality of physical slots, the database card being to store information relating to the control plane processing, the information relating to the control plane processing including information associated with timers that are associated with one or more network protocols that are implemented by the device, and the timers including a particular timer that indicates a lifetime of the particular control packet, and the backup control card being to: receive a signal that indicates that the master control card is out of service, retrieve, from the database card, portions of the information stored by the database card after receiving the signal, the portions of the information including information associated with the particular timer, and the database card being separate and remote from the master control card and the backup control card, and perform the control plane processing based on the portions of the information retrieved from the database card, when performing the control plane processing, the backup control card is to: designate the source device as being out of service based on the information associated with the particular timer and based on another control packet not being received from the source device.