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     Re: anyone out there

then Roger Burton West's all..
> 
> On or about Tue, Oct 12, 1999 at 03:06:43PM -0400, Jonathan A. Zdziarski typed:
> >lots of folks have switched to the commercial software 'netcool' which
> >runs about $100,000 or so.  it's much nicer, but obviously nocol has its
> >own value in being free.
> 
> "Much nicer" is an interesting way of putting it. "A total waste of
> money" would be more accurate - the probes don't work, all the IP-
> based probes _insist on_ DNS rather than IP numbers - so useful if
> your nameserver falls over, all of a sudden all the probes fail -
> and you need a high-end system to run it on.
> 
> I've looked at a lot of different monitoring packages, and they're
> all horribly expensive (or freeware). I haven't yet seen one that
> worked as well as NOCOL.

If nocol is so good, why is the support so lacking? Or am I just blind?
Is there activity on this list beyond people jsut trying to get things
going and a few helpful people who maintain their monitors diligently
while the core package gets more and more outdated? Is there an effort
to release a new version or add some of the features I and 100 other people
are looking for?

Is someone attempting to kick start it? Are the original author(s) still
working on it, or will it be taken over (or worse, will a code fork be
the only thing to kickstart the authors, resulting in two development
paths)?

> >> Has anyone got nocol doing hierarchical conditions, so that when a link
> >> is down you dont also get paged with SMTP, Web, Pop, Imap, Ftp and everything
> >> else being down too?
> 
> No... but on the other hand I have got a once-every-five-minutes cron
> job that tells me all the system status changes in that time.

Hmm. I wonder if we can fit these messages into a single 100 char alpha
page. ;) This seems to be the way to go with paging - collect all
information until some cutoff time (every 5 min) and then send a page
of distilled most-critical information.

You got this pager interface code handy?

Does anyone have a nice generic paging scheduler with easy to setup
weekly schedules for people on call?

/kc
-- 
Ken Chase, Director Operations                  Velocet Communications Inc.
math@velocet.ca                                              Toronto CANADA
--
"Sometimes two [harmless] words, when put together, strike fear in the
  hearts of men -- Microsoft Wallet."                           - Dave Gilbert