Ping

[Ben Rubinstein]

on 19/3/03 10:36 pm, David Vaughan wrote

> I saw that you were discussing with Dar using Open in Rev, as your
> spare machines are OS 9, but if you have an OS X machine a low overhead
> way to do this is to write a very short shell script in OS X to ping,
> append the output to a log file and sleep for half to one minute. Run
> that in background at low priority and it will be unnoticeable in any
> circumstance. A cron job or the next sentence's Rev app can keep the
> log to a day's data. On a spare OS 9 machine, write your Rev app which
> parses the host's log, analyses and presents events. I personally would
> find this simpler, given your resources, compared with fiddling with
> open, close and timeouts, as everything is short to write and will work
> immediately.

David,

Thanks for your input.  If I had an OS X machine running 24/7 I'm sure
you're right that this would be the best solution - unfortunately right now
the only OS X machines we have are a couple of powerbooks, frequently out of
the office etc.  Whereas ancient 68K and PPC machines are ten a penny in our
hovel.

However, a dodgy server may be transitioning to OS X shortly, so I might see
if we can hang on for that - simpler and spending less time fiddling on this
rocker cover problem is definitely an advantage.  I'll probably try a short
period of fiddling, and if I'm not getting anywhere, will take your advice.

regards,
 
  Ben Rubinstein               |  Email: benr_mc at cogapp.com
  Cognitive Applications Ltd   |  Phone: +44 (0)1273-821600
  http://www.cogapp.com        |  Fax  : +44 (0)1273-728866