Re: [cobalt-users] "Auto" E-mail for that warm and fuzzy feeling

["Chris Adams" <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 19 Feb 2000 16:29:57 CST, M Fryer wrote:

>Maybe I'm the only one, but I would like to be able to have our RaQ3 E-mail 
>us a predetermined times (In our case once every couple of hours) with 
>details of the status of the various functions of the box (Sort of like an 
>automatic Active Monitor.)

If you wanted to, you could just use cron to start a script which would email
you at a given interval.

Personally, I have sysmon (http://www.sysmon.org/) set up on the (Qube2)
mailserver here. It checks the status of everything else on the network and
I'd know if the mail server went down since my mail client would squawk at me
about it. Sysmon can be configured to check network connectivity,
web/email/news/ftp servers and has a bunch of nice conditionals (e.g. if a
box drops off the network, I get paged once instead getting one page for each
service on the box which is no longer available) as well as the ability to
log to a webpage. 

I have a NetPositive browser embedded in my BeOS desktop at home with
sysmon's page loaded, so I can easily see if any of the machines I worry
about have failed a check just by looking at the desktop. If they fail more
than a set number of checks, I get paged.

>We have also considered one of the many online monitoring services 
>(NetMechanic, Net Whistle, etc) Anyone have anything good or bad to say 
>about these ?

http://uptime.arsdigita.com. It's easy, fast and free. I have Uptime
reporting directly to my cell-phone, so a total connectivity failure here
wouldn't interfere.