January 25th, 2000

[6:00 AM] Monitor Your Mac Servers, And Get A Tattletale Report Too by Staff James Sentman has updated his sever performance maintenance application, Whistle Blower, to version 1.0b4. Whistle Blower allows server administrators to monitor server performance while providing feedback on server functionality and response. According to Mr. Sentman: Whistle Blower is a server maintenance tool that can perform regular checks of your servers and perform various actions upon discovering that one is not responding. It is compatible with the full range of WebStar4 server suite products. Whistle Blower can e-mail you or your pager. Whistle Blower can launch any AppleScript, application or document upon failure and can also restart any socket of any connected powerkey unit. This 4th beta is a major bugfix/cleanup prior to the 1.0 release and should be considered the first final candidate release. The major additions and fixes are: Much enhanced GenericTCP task can now validate open ended streams. Can limit the number of connections allowed at once. The status.html file is now created from a template file so that it can be integrated into your site's layout. can disable the scrolling hash marks to improve performance when administered via TB2. http check now properly deals with servers that force a persistent connection. multiple radius server checks at the same time no longer cause the second one to fail. Fixed several memory leaks associated with the main window drawing code. If you had memory problems this will fix them. Whistle Blower currently supports checking the following server types: Web Servers. (Whistle Blower can also send post form arguments and validate the server return to check for proper functioning of CGI applications) AppleShare IP Servers DNS Servers Filemaker Pro Servers First Class Servers 4D Servers (4D Open) FTP Servers Generic TCP listeners Hotline Servers IMAP Servers LDAP Servers News Servers POP3 Servers QuickTime Streaming Servers Radius Authentication Servers SMTP Servers Telnet Servers Whistle Blower features web based administration. You can check on the status of your servers, control the powerkeys attached to your system and run any of the scripts in your scripts folder from anywhere. Whistle Blower is currently in public beta, and the final release is expected to be available for US$90. You can find more information at James Sentman's web site. The Mac Observer Spin: Tools like these are vital to the Mac system administrator. Unfortunately, tools like these are one area where the Mac lags behind the Open Source, and even the Windows NT community. With that said, it is great to see Mr. Sentman release Whistle Blower. Hopefully this will be simply the first among many new such server monitoring tools that get released for the Mac. James Sentman