WebProWorld
Why care about disk free space?
The obvious answer is that low free space means upcoming problems, like the inability to receive mail (for mail servers) or the inability to store new files (for file servers). There are numerous obvious reasons why free space is an operations management priority.
Most businesses investing in pay-for-placement advertising on search engines know if their campaigns are making or losing money. But most know little more. According to one Internet expert, a deeper understanding of available data can make or save a company a lot of money.
What is web site monitoring all about? Here is Carl’s story:
Carl returned to the office after a tough day of negotiations. He still was not sure if the crucial deal was on or off, but dinner would soon be waiting and he had just enough time left to check his emails and his phone messages.
Bill Huang sits down at his computer. As he connects to the Internet, he glances out at the sun poking its nose above the Hong Kong skyline. It will be another busy day, and he has to order those slippers for his wife before rushing off to a meeting.
Did you ever run out of disk space on an important machine? Never? Well, I’ve done so and experienced all the headaches that come along with this situation. In this article, I describe how I implemented a basic automatic monitor system with the help of a little scripting.
Monitoring Windows NT/2000/XP/2003 is important even for small environments. Automatically monitored, critical failures can often be avoided. But how to monitor a system without too much effort? The basic idea behind a successful monitoring and alerting system is to centralize all system events at a single monitoring station. Once the information is centralized, it can be used to build an alerting system or even carry out corrective actions.
Many modern systems provide a way to watch a directory for events (new files, reading the directory, modification of a file in the directory, etc.). This facility can be done in various ways, from providing hooks in the filesystem code itself to something that watches for inode changes. Linux and BSD have several possibilities in that regard, including dnotify, changedfiles, and watch.
In April, a CERT advisory announced the discovery of two separate buffer-overflow vulnerabilities in Snort, a popular security-monitoring tool used for detecting suspicious network activities. This development was disturbing and ironic: system administrators install and run programs like Snort to improve security, and don’t often consider the possibility that the tools themselves might be attacked and exploited to create entirely new security holes. It’s therefore important to understand precisely what happened here, especially since the same mechanisms used against Snort could threaten other security tools.
Monitoring and tracking are two aspects of business that most people tend to ignore. However, they are two of the most important aspects of business.
Although the VB.Net printer handling has improved immeasurably over that offered by Visual Basic 6 there is still a need to turn to the Windows API in order to monitor a print queue.
