Patent ID: 6850528

Claim:
A system for maintaining network information, the system comprising: a network comprising a plurality of sub-networks in communication with one another over a communications backbone, each sub-network having a router linked to the communications backbone for use in performing communications with other sub-networks, each of the routers publishing router attribute information about itself over the communications backbone, the router attribute information comprising a router identity object, the router identity object comprising: a router role data field indicating a role of the network router; and a filtering enabled data field indicating whether the network router has filtering turned on for at least one network protocol that the network router is running; a directory service linked to the communications backbone having associated therewith a database, the database storing the published router attribute information for each of the routers; and a query engine associated with the directory service for gathering information from the database as a function of specified router attribute information, the query engine configured to, at least: accept a query of the database which includes a specified attribute of network routers; and return to the querier a list of network routers having the specified attribute; and wherein the directory service is configured to, at least, issue to one of the returned network routers a message including data representative of a desired configuration update to be performed by the network router.