Diagnosing Home-Networking Problems with NetPrints

robk — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:49:00 GMT

Now here's technology I could use right now, and I'll bet you could, too.

Ranjita Bhagwan is a researcher at Microsoft Research India who found herself getting frustrated with her home network. And that got her to thinking about her family.

"I am a home-network user," Bhagwan says, "and I’ve faced this problem a lot. I’ve studied computer science, so I have some knowledge on how networking works. And if it’s such a problem for me, then I shudder to think what a problem it must be for my mother or for my grandparents, who have no idea what’s happening.

"This is a way to simplify things for that population."

Her thinking led to NetPrints, a technique for diagnosing home-networking issues with a single click.

"I have a client that works on your machine," Bhagwan explains. "If you have a problem with any application, like to your e-mail service, you just press one button, and it goes to a service and resolves the problem."

One-touch resolution? Sounds like a dream come true.

"Home networks are growing," she observes, "and because of that, there’s this unmanaged environment. You have different companies' routers interacting with different computers, and that causes a lot of problems. That’s where we see this being helpful."

The unmanaged nature of many home networks is the crux of the problem.

"There’s so much diverse configuration network in a home network, Bhagwan observes. "What we finally decided to do was to use shared wisdom to resolve the problem. If you have the same configuration as me, and you’ve resolved your problem, in that case, that information should be ready for me to resolve my problem, as well."

In a nutshell, here's how NetPrints works: When you have a problem with an application, you can open the NetPrints client on your home machine. It automatically detects the application that’s having the problem and then you press the Diagnose button. The client crawls the configuration information from your home network and sends it to the service.

The service uses a structured index database to figure out which configuration-information parameter is wrong and ships a suggestion to your client. The client then automatically fixes that configuration on the router or on the home network. And, voilà, the application starts working.

"The server side," Bhagwan explains, "is using a machine-learning algorithm to build a decision tree using the configuration, and that’s how it figures out how it can go from a bad configuration to a good one."

NetPrints is still being evaluated, but so far, things look quite promising.

"We have tested it with four or five applications right now, and four or five different routers, Bhagwan reports, "and it seems to work really well. We looked at a few problems that we scrounged around the Internet for, related to VPN clients, to gaming systems, to media players, and we found that for a large majority of them, something like this would be extremely valuable."

I'm sure I speak for millions when l say, the sooner I get my hands on this, the better.

Ranjita Bhagwan in her TechFest booth, March 5, 2008.

TechFest Live! : problem

Diagnosing Home-Networking Problems with NetPrints