Design and Development of Deterministic Finite Automata Parser for Querying Hardware and Software Configuration Information of Local Area Network

Abstract

A typical Local Area Network (LAN) of an educational institution hosts different hardware devices and contains numerous softwares installed, serving the needs of persons from low technical expertise to high technical standards. Further as the academic curriculum is upgraded most of the existing softwares become obsolete and new softwares are installed or existing softwares are upgraded to new version to cater the needs which is a continuous process. To address such issues, a quick and reliable snapshot of the network configuration is desirable at any point of time. On many occasions the softwares with limited usage are installed only on few machines of a LAN. Thus, it proves to be a time consuming task to search the whole network for a single rarely used software. To tackle such issues the authors in the current paper have provided a first hand tool for automating the process of discovering LAN configuration, storing it persistently and querying the stored information in human language. The entire process is automated without any human intervention. The information pertaining to the hardware and software configuration is stored in a persistent Relational DataBase Management System (RDBMS) which can be manipulated by the tool automatically as the new hardware is connected to a LAN or a software configuration changes. The end user instead of querying the database directly will use the natural language, termed as Hardware Query Language (HQL) and Software Query Language (SOQL) designed by the authors, which is interfaced with RDBMS using DFA parser implemented by the authors. To implement HQL/SOQL, a finite set of symbols, words and language rules are defined which together constitute HQL/SOQL grammar. In this paper we present a deterministic finite automata (DFA) parser developed by us for parsing HQL/SOQL tokens. The state table and state diagrams are developed for different tokens of HQL/SOQL identified by us. State information is stored in a persistent database management system as a measure towards improving efficiency and extensibility. Currently, HQL/SOQL consists of only few commands and more commands will be added to HQL/SOQL command set in near future. The reports generated are exported to MS Word using Microsoft Word 12.0 object library.