I use WhatsUp Gold to monitor the machines at work. Been using it for years and it has worked great for us. Recently I hit a little challenge though. Needed to monitor the event log on some servers and if a particular Windows Service threw a specific error message I’d need to get the service restarted.

My first approach was overly convoluted (if you’re really curious you can read more in this support forum post). After some false starts with start and stop events I found Sysinternals’ PsService and realized I could use it with WhatsUp’s ability to run “Program Actions” to just completely restart the service in one step.

I ran the psservice.exe command from the WhatsUp server against a development server, then checked the dev server’s event viewer and confirmed the service was restarted. Next I created the Program Action in WhatsUp and used the Test feature to make sure it all worked. So far so good; more events in the dev server’s event viewer logs.

I went to bed, comfortable in my knowledge that everything was looking good.

This morning I checked WhatsUp’s Activity Log and saw that it had fired the service restart last night. Yay! But looking closer at the server in question, I didn’t see any evidence in the logs of the service actually  being restarted. Boo! WhatsUp just thought it was running psservice. (this is post 2 in that support forum thread I linked earlier).

Enter eventcreate.exe

I needed a way to test this more. Clearly I couldn’t just sit around hoping for errors to show up in the event logs to fire up my little process. A quick web search turned up the fact that eventcreate.exe was already on my Windows 2003 server. This little gem lets you easily create event log entries — even on different servers across the network. Brilliant! I’ve been working with Windows for a couple decades now and I’d never even heard of it before.

Now I had a way to create error entries in the logs that would fire off my psservice service restarts. Sadly, all this gained me was a way to not restart the service more frequently. WhatsUp assured me it was firing the program and the dev server continued to not get the service restarted.

Frustrating.

Eureka!

Then it hit me. The first time you run any Sysinternals app you get the license agreement and you have to agree to it to actually run the app.

The WhatsUp service is running as the Local System account and I finally realized that it needed to accept the agreement.

Another quick search turned up a blog post with an easy way to fire up a command prompt running as the Local System user using PsExec. Amusingly enough, this app was bundled with PsService.

psexec -i -s cmd.exe

From that prompt I was able to run PsService.exe and did indeed have to Agree to the terms.

But wait, it still didn’t work!

I had one last step to go. The WhatsUp monitoring service (technically, the “Ipswitch Service Control Manager” service) needed to be altered. Specifically, it needed to have “Allow service to interact with desktop” enabled. (and this would be the third post in that earlier support forum post I linked)

That was the final fix. Now it all works as desired — and expected.

Related posts:

1. WhatsUp Deferred Alerts
2. Oh, Did You Want a Timeout?
3. In Which Regmon Saves the Day

Yesterday I had the opportunity to grab one on a “trial basis” (I’m quite sure I’ll be purchasing it) and quickly snapped it up. It was running XP Pro well enough but after I did some updating I ran into a series of BSOD issues. Since I have recently been using Ubuntu Netbook Edition I decided that would be a great OS for this little rig.

Installing it, however, gave me some difficulties.

First I tried booting from the USB stick that I had used when I installed Ubuntu Netbook on my Eee. The X40 just wouldn’t do it. After some research I found some anecdotal notes that seem to indicate that the X40 has issues booting from large USB sticks. Unfortunately, I don’t have any 512 MB sticks laying around to test with – and I don’t think the Netbook Edition install would fit on one.

Fortunately, the unit I have came with the UltraBase dock so I was able to try a CD install. I grabbed the image from the Ubuntu downloads page (scroll down to the Netbook Live CD). The boot process would start OK but then the screen would go black. A quick search turned up a blog post that pointed me to a Bugs page with details about the issue and work-arounds. “Workaround A” worked for me, both to boot from the Live CD but also to permanently resolve the issue once I had it installed.

With the video issue solved, I’m pleased to say that Ubuntu Netbook Edition runs great on this little box. All the more impressive as it currently has just 768 MB of RAM – something I hope to address later today once I dig through the old box ‘o ram in the garage…

Battery life is good. With the included extended battery we seem to be headed for the 4 – 5 hour range.

The wife acceptance factor is huge. She loves the idea of having a little and light portable to float around the house with. This morning I found her curled up on the couch with it running through email and Facebook. Later I found it on the kitchen island with some recipes up as she was preparing for this afternoon’s festivities. The12” panel is small but not too small and the native 1024×768 resolution works well for the majority of the main stream web sites we use.

I think I’ll hold off on buying a netbook for home now

Related posts:

1. Trying out Ubuntu Netbook 10.04
2. No Ubuntu Today
3. Ubuntu: Install Inside Windows

Hamachi² changed things a bit by moving all the network management to a central web site and giving some more options to configuration. For instance, you can now configure “Hub-and-spoke” networks in which the clients can only see the servers (or the “hub”). Not quite as simple to configure as the prior version but I do like the additional security and configuration options so I upgraded last year. Always meant to mention it here, just never got the round ‘tuit…

When V2 was initially released it was only for Windows. Very disappointing. Happily, I recently noticed Linux and Mac beta versions on the LogMeIn Labs page – command line only, but better than nothing (and no, I have no clue when they appeared. Been a long time since I had checked the labs page!).

I installed it on my little Ubuntu Netbook Eee last month and have had no issues running it. Just pop to a terminal window and type hamachi –? to see your various options. It wasn’t too tough to sort out.

Today I discovered Haguichi. [hat tip to Web Upd8] A slick little graphical user interface for Hamachi2 on Linux that runs a lot like the original Hamachi for Windows UI but also supports Hamachi2 (as beta). I love it!

Start it up and it runs up in the notification area just like you’d expect. Single click and you get an easy to use interface to see your networks and their contents. Right click a machine and you’ll get some options. All very friendly.

I haven’t analyzed exactly how much space it uses… as a C# app built on the Mono framework there is bit of a footprint here. All I know for sure is I still have space left on the little 4GB SSD drive so I’m happy.

If you’re using this with Ubuntu Netbook Edition you’ll want to make one small change. By default, all apps are maximized when ran – that makes haguichi rather ugly… In a terminal window run gconf-editor In the resulting application, navigate to Apps and then click on maximus. On the right pane, right-click on “exclude_class” and click “edit key.” Now click the add button and type in “Haguichi” (this is case-sensitive, be sure that’s a capital H). Log out and back in and no more maximizing.

Related posts:

1. New server, Hamachi Linux
2. Hamachi VPN as service – why?
3. Hamachi Mobile

At first I absolutely hated it.

Don’t get me wrong, it really isn’t horrible… but my initial impression was that it writes a lot like an old ball point pen with ink that’s on the verge of drying out. Not quite smooth and almost feels like it “skips” a bit. Things get a bit better when I press harder than normal but that eventually results in a sore hand.

However, when compared to the erasable ink pens of the 80’s (when I was in school) this thing is incredible. I’ve successfully erased things I wrote several days ago. In fact, the erasability of it all is why this will be added to my daily kit.

While I really enjoy my G2 pens, the amount of stuff I scratch out leaves such a mess when I’m doing a lot of writing and – I can’t lie – that drives me nuts. With this liquid pencil I have something that doesn’t blur nearly as easily as pencil but is still very erasable. Turns out I’m willing to put up with a less than G2 writing experience just for that.

Anyone else tried it out? What do you think?

Related posts:

1. Fancy Pen
2. A Quick Overview on De-Cluttering a Desktop

Turns out I wasn’t quite done yet. Here’s a snip of a conversation I had earlier today with my CTO, Hans.

“Ya know, I wish I had some better tools to see how many active users we have across all the sites at a given moment,” I said. “That would be helpful when I want to sneak in a quick change during the day.”

“Well what do you currently do to check?” he asked.

“I just pop open the latest IIS log file, jump to the bottom and see if the most recent entries are from my once-a-minute WhatsUp Gold site monitoring. If the last few entries are from WhatsUp then I know we’ve been idle that many minutes.”

He nodded and we moved onto another issue which resolved around some memory related issues.

I commented, “It seems like this main w3p process never shrinks. It just keeps growing its memory usage. How weird. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen a Windows Event about it shutting down or spinning back up…”

Hans just gave me the look and said, “Didn’t you mention your monitoring process hits that site every minute?”

#facepalm#

“oh yeah… I guess it’ll never hit that 2 hour timeout, huh?” Don’t laugh… If you poll the site every minute don’t expect it to ever go idle!

Today I spent some time fixing that. I’m not sure what the best practices are but I have an approach that seems reasonable.

First, I created a new site with just one page (ping.html). Next, I created a new App Pool called monitoring just like the Default. But instead of a timeout I configured it to restart itself at 1:00 AM nightly. Then I converted that new site to an IIS application using that new App Pool.

I changed the WhatsUp monitor to use a custom HTTP Content monitor pointed at the new site. Now it tests for content from the ping.html page instead of just seeing if something responds on port 80 so this is probably even a bit better than it was before.

This brought up another small issue though.

Wait! How do I know which w3p process ties to which App Pool?

Now I have more App Pools all running as the same user. How can I quickly tell which process goes to which pool? Easy!

This picture lays it out:

On the IIS server bring up a command prompt, navigate to the system32 directory and run:

cscript iisapp.vbs

The output lists the process ID (PID) and name for each w3p.exe process. Problem solved.

Related posts:

1. IIS 6 and Worker Process Recycling
2. Fun With WhatsUp and PsService.exe
3. WhatsUp Deferred Alerts

Pretty cool, eh? Back of the shirt has a WordPress.org logo.

I believe this is something I got for weighing in on the GPL side of things during last month’s Thesis theme / GPL kerfluffle.

I dig the certificate

Related posts:

1. WordPress Theme Generator
2. Post Facelift Notes
3. First Release: Visualize Advanced Features

Today, while running updates, it ran out of space. And trust me, that’s with the bare minimum installed. Some Asus drivers, Google Chrome. Everything else — even .NET frameworks — uninstalled.

Seemed like a good time to try Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formerly known as Ubuntu Netbook Remix).  Downloading and installing went quite well thanks to some great instructions and I’m happy with how well it runs on this first generation netbook. Remember, I’m sporting 1GB of RAM and a 900 Mhz Celeron here… Boot times are crazy fast. I’ll have to get a stop watch out soon, but I’m thinking well under a minute.

Speaking of performance, the included Firefox browser wasn’t so great (nor was it all that great in XP on this thing) but installing Google Chrome was easily done. The chrome install didn’t add an icon to the menus, but that was easily done with the Menu Editor. Chrome runs great on this rig.

Primary use for this machine is to sit on my desk during the day and run a few monitoring web pages (connected to a 17″ monitor and slaved via Synergy+) and be my little “on the go” machine when I’m out and about. I look forward to seeing how well this fresh install works.

Related posts:

1. ThinkPad X40 and Ubuntu Netbook 10.04
2. Netbook Linux Adventures
3. Follow-up to Netbook Linux Adventures