Wow, it's been 6 months. I'm getting really bad at this. Well, I'm going to try to fix that, because I've done a TON in the past 6 months. I want to mention one thing today, but here's a list of stuff I'll try to crank out in the next few days:

Windows Print Queueing from Unix (allowing for true FIFO and archiving)
What ever happened with our phone system?
DID Based faxing
Active Directory and Group Policy actually do rock
How to make WAN printers work over dialup

I'm sure there' s more. But today it's just a plug for an app I've used for the past year, and love it more and more every day. It's called Servers Alive, from Woodstone Consulting (www.woodstone.nu/salive). At it's simplest level, it's an alerting program. If something goes down, it alerts you. But it's so much more.

For starters, it's either cheap or free, depending on how you're using it. If you only have up to 10 devices or services to check, it's free (of course, they'd like you to register, and I'm sure the support is better once you do). For up to 100 services or devices, it's $100--well worth it for us.

Servers Alive isn't just a basic Ping utility. While it can ping a device (and that's primarily how I use it), it can also check any number of services or other protocols. It can check IPX connectivity, it can see if your web server is running, etc. And even the Ping check is fully featured--it doesn't just tell you if the device is gone; you can configure it to tell you if it's running slow as well.

You configure each check that you want to do. Then, you configure alerts. What's great is that it doesn't just offer the option to tell you when it's down. Most of my servers I have set to alert me after two down "cycles" (more on that in a sec), and then again once it's back up. That way if there's a brief "hiccup" on a WAN line, I'm not getting paged about it. I also get "reminder" pages at certain intervals.

As for the cycles, you can configure that as well. By default, it has "day" and "night" settings for weekdays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Since we are a 6-6 operation on weekdays, and closed on weekends, I've set "day" to be 6am-6pm. On week "days", it checks every two minutes (so, if something goes down, I get paged no more than 4 minutes later). On nights and weekends, it checks every 15 minutes (and I might bump that out even further).

Back to alerts for a second. It supports SMTP email, dialing via a modem to a pager or cell phone, and a whole slew of other functions. All I use right now is SMTP email, but once I start talking about our WAN redundancy solution, I'll be using more features of it. But if I told you now I'd have to kill you... :)