Remote token ring beacon station detection and isolation

DETAILED DESCRIPTION From the foregoing it can be appreciated that it would be desirable to provide a method and apparatus suitable for detecting and isolating beaconing stations in a token ring network wherein the agent responsible for detecting and isolating faulty stations is not itself a station within the token ring network.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a remote token ring beacon station detection and isolation mechanism which in one embodiment is suitable for servicing multiple token ring networks or network segments.
It is another object of the present invention to provide the remote token ring beacon station detection and isolation mechanism in an agent which may be stationed on some token ring networks and not a station on other token ring networks.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a remote token ring beacon station detection and isolation mechanism which itself may be an agent involved in a different kind of network segment such as Ethernet or FDDI, or residing on no network segment whatsoever.
These and other objects of the present invention are provided by a mechanism for remote token ring beacon station detection and isolation.
One embodiment of the present invention is implemented in a concentrator which supports multiple network segments.
The concentrator may include a network management module (NMM) which may participate as a station on a subset of a network segments associated with the concentrator.
For those token ring network segments in which the NMM of the concentrator is not a station, a process running on the NMM provides for remote detection functionality for beaconing stations on the remote token ring and provides commands to stations on the remote ring for isolating the problem station(s).
In the described embodiment, the concentrator supports a backplane common management bus (CMB).
Thus, the NMM, while not a station on the remote token ring network, may still poll stations from the remote network for fault information and provide commands to remote stations through the CMB