Abstract: A method and apparatus for automated procurement of information about electronic items such that the information is to be used in the population of consignment or personal inventory node database entries in a network of consignment nodes or personal inventory nodes for used and collectible electronic goods having inherent electronic networking capability using arbitrary set of protocol stacks/protocols. The invention describes a novel and unexpected use of a plurality of low cost posting/search/access terminals (laptops, PCs, PDAs, SUN computers etc) that had been so far used as manual entry stations serving the purpose of manual population of the said consignment node or personal social networking profiles by humans. The novelty of the invention describes the unexpected use of such terminals as themselves being the subject and source of automatically gleaned information suitable for the population of global consignment or personal inventory node databases.

Abstract: A system and method is disclosed for collecting, storing and reporting raw log data from log-producing devices such as firewalls and routers. The log-producing devices may be both local and remote—i.e., linked to a raw log server via a LAN and/or a WAN. A log data analyzer at a remote location gathers log data from devices at that remote location into time-defined sets and then sends those sets over a WAN (which may be the Internet) to a raw log server using a first protocol. Local log-producing devices may send their log data to the log data analyzer via a LAN using a second protocol. The log data analyzer forwards the raw log data local devices to an appropriate log data analyzer for parsing, summarizing and storage in one or more databases. The raw log server combines local and remote sets of raw log data for a given time period and stores them in a storage area of raw log data.