Methods and systems for managing a premises are described. A premises or devices at a premises may be associated with one or more premises zones. The one or more premises zones may be associated with corresponding content. If data is received from a device associated with a particular premises zone, then the content may be output. The content may be used to notify a user of an event, state change, or other indication associated with the particular premises zone.

A server-based environment for reporting a status of a security, monitoring and automation controller is provided. Detecting cessation of an always-on persistent network connection between the SMA controller and the server is also provided. Reporting the cessation of the network connection to an end user and defined others is further provided. A further aspect provides for automatically reporting an alarm event to a central station, the end user, and others, in the event the cessation of the network connection occurs while the SMA controller is aimed and after a zone fault event, and not receiving a disarm notification prior to expiration of a preset entry delay.

There is described an electrical cabinet for a traffic signaling system. The electrical cabinet generally has a housing; an input encoder, the input encoder having input ports receiving input signals carrying states associated with input devices of the traffic signaling system, a serial encoding circuit serially encoding the states of the input signals into a headerless signal, the headerless signal beginning with a first time slot and ending with a last time slot temporally spaced apart from the first time slot, the time slots carrying the states of the input signals, and an output port; and a traffic light controller having a serial decoding circuit receiving the headerless signal and serially decoding the headerless signal to retrieve the states of the input signals carried by the time slots of the headerless signal, the traffic light controller controlling the traffic signaling system based on the retrieved states.

This disclosure describes techniques for performing communications between devices using various aspects of Ethernet standards. As further described herein, a protocol is disclosed that may be used for communications between devices, where the communications take place over a physical connection complying with Ethernet standards. Such a protocol may enable reliable and in-order delivery of frames between devices, while following Ethernet physical layer rules, Ethernet symbol encoding, Ethernet lane alignment, and/or Ethernet frame formats.

A method includes receiving, by a storage unit of a storage network, a check request message from a computing device of the storage network, where the check request message includes a group of slice names of a plurality of sets of slice names associated with a plurality of sets of encoded data slices, where a plurality of data segments are dispersed storage error encoded into the plurality of sets of encoded data slices. The method further includes determining, by the storage unit, whether an error condition exists for an encoded data slice associated with the group of slice names. When no, the method includes sending, by the storage unit, a check response message to the computing device, where the check response message includes a group of slice information regarding the group of slice names. When yes, the method includes disregarding sending the check response message.

Some embodiments provide a method of providing distributed storage services to a host computer from a network interface card (NIC) of the host computer. At the NIC, the method accesses a set of one or more external storages operating outside of the host computer through a shared port of the NIC that is not only used to access the set of external storages but also for forwarding packets not related to an external storage. In some embodiments, the method accesses the external storage set by using a network fabric storage driver that employs a network fabric storage protocol to access the external storage set. The method presents the external storage as a local storage of the host computer to a set of programs executing on the host computer. In some embodiments, the method presents the local storage by using a storage emulation layer on the NIC to create a local storage construct that presents the set of external storages as a local storage of the host computer.

A method for configuring a protocol in a virtual private network (VPN) service environment, the method including receiving, from a user device, device information associated with operation of the user device during an established VPN connection; determining, based at least in part on the device information, a given VPN protocol from among a plurality of VPN protocols for utilization during the established VPN connection; and transmitting, to the user device, information associated with the given VPN protocol to enable the user device and a VPN server to utilize the given VPN protocol during the established VPN connection. Various other aspects are contemplated.

Some embodiments provide a method of providing distributed storage services to a host computer from a network interface card (MC) of the host computer. At the NIC, the method accesses a set of one or more external storages operating outside of the host computer through a shared port of the NIC. In some embodiments, the method accesses the external storage set by using a network fabric storage driver that employs a network fabric storage protocol to access the external storage set. The method presents the external storage as a local storage of the host computer to a set of programs executing on the host computer. In some embodiments, the method presents the local storage by using a storage emulation layer on the NIC to create a local storage construct that presents the set of external storages as a local storage of the host computer.

Some embodiments provide a method of providing distributed storage services to a host computer from a network interface card (NIC) of the host computer. At the NIC, the method accesses a set of one or more external storages operating outside of the host computer through a shared port of the NIC that is not only used to access the set of external storages but also for forwarding packets not related to an external storage. In some embodiments, the method accesses the external storage set by using a network fabric storage driver that employs a network fabric storage protocol to access the external storage set. The method presents the external storage as a local storage of the host computer to a set of programs executing on the host computer. In some embodiments, the method presents the local storage by using a storage emulation layer on the NIC to create a local storage construct that presents the set of external storages as a local storage of the host computer.

A method for configuring a protocol in a virtual private network (VPN) service environment, the method including receiving, from a user device, device information associated with operation of the user device during an established VPN connection; configuring, based at least in part on the device information, a given VPN protocol from among a plurality of VPN protocols for utilization during the established VPN connection; and transmitting, to the user device, information associated with the given VPN protocol to enable the user device and a VPN server to utilize the given VPN protocol during the established VPN connection. Various other aspects are contemplated.