DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE PREFERRED EMBODIMENTS In the following description, reference is made to the accompanying drawings which form a part hereof and which illustrate several embodiments of the present invention.
It is understood that other embodiments may be utilized and structural and operational changes may be made without departing from the scope of the present invention.
Computing Environment FIG.
1 illustrates a hardware and software environment in which preferred embodiments are implemented.
A computing environment 2 comprises a server 4, a help desk system 6, a customer system 8, and a network 10 providing communication therebetween.
The server 4 may be any server device known in the art capable of servicing network requests, e.
g.
, IBM NETFINITY.
RTM.
, AS/400.
RTM.
, and RS/6000.
RTM.
; and POWEREDGE.
RTM.
from Dell Computer Corporation.
** In preferred embodiments, the server 4 would include Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) software to service HTTP requests from the customer system 8.
The server 6 and help desk system 6 may also include software to handle document requests in data transfer protocols other than HTTP, such FTP, Gopher, WAIS, NNTP, SMTP, etc.
The customer system 8 is any computer system used by a customer or other end user of a computer related product or service, which may comprise a personal computer, server, laptop, etc.
The customer system 8 includes a browser program 12 that can submit document requests to the server 4.
In preferred embodiments, the browser program 12 is a Hypertext Markup-Language (HTML) browser, e.
g.
, NETSCAPE Communicator, the MICROSOFT Internet Explorer, Spry Mosaic, NCSA Mosaic, Lynx, Opera, GNUscape Navigator, etc.
**, that include HTTP software to function as HTTP clients capable of transferring requests for documents to the server 4.
The HTTP server protocol is described in "Hypertext Transfer Protocol--HTTP/1.
1," Network Working Group, Request for Comments No.
2068 (January, 1997), which publication is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety
|
Fault Detection 
