Ensuring that machines are online is one of the most important tasks that network administrators perform every day. The moment a machine goes offline, administrators need to be alerted so that they can get the machine back online. With time being such a crucial factor in high network availability, administrators need a monitoring tool that can quickly notify them when a machine is offline.
Perl is the perfect scripting language for writing such a tool. However, although writing a Perl script to monitor machines is simple, scripting a notification system isn't so simple.
To be fair, you can easily write a monitoring script that produces a log file, registers Win32 event log entries, or even sends an email message or a page. But if you're working on a computer when something goes wrong, you need an alert that jumps out and is in your face. You could decide to write code that pops open a dialog box with a message. But if you use that approach and many alerts occur while you're away from your computer, you have to wade through numerous dialog boxes and click OK in each one. A better way to provide alerts is to use the taskbar status area (TSA). . . .
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C:\NotifyTSA>perl hostmonitor.pl 192.168.30.119
Loading icon named 'Error'
Loading icon named 'Normal'
icmp socket error - at hostmonitor.pl line 104
"ppm install win32-pingicmp" installed fine and when i run it now it says its already installed.
Anonymous User February 18, 2005