Polling around….

This weekend has been kind of crappy as we had some cisco switches flake out, but nobody knew anything happened… I’d been pulled away on so many things over the last few years that monitoring them kind of fell by the waaaayside.

Well in this economic environment nobody is going to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for some simple syslog/polling system that pages people. I needed one for free.

And years ago, I wrote a simple one that revolved around SQL Server 7/MSDE 1.0

Anyways I’ve made it as 2 CD images, and if you are bored, or in the need to poll devices with a basic TCP connect you can download it here:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/simplemssqlnetw/

What may be useful for people is that I’ve put some impossible to find software on the prerequisite CD…

Namely:

NT 4.0 sp6a
MSDE 1.0
Option Pack (IIS4)
SQL 7 sp4

For some reason all the above stuff is getting dammed near impossible to find on Microsoft’s site. I guess it is end of the road for the NT 4.0 heyday. So at the least, this is my way to keep a location to download this software, as I’m sure someone will need it someday.

MSDE 1.0 for those who don’t know was a redistributable version of SQL Server 7.0 that had a 10 user limit, and a 2GB database size limit. Also there was no GUI management but it was great to use, because unlike SQL Express, it included the SQL Agent. The agent can run tasks at certain times, say like run a TSQL script that dumps a list of machines from a table into the hosts file, then tries to connect to each machine and record the state into a database…..

It was VERY useful stuff for the time.

There is no exciting screnshot, as I never did make an interface to the thing, instead I opted to configure everything through Access.

Other then that, I’ve been playing with a BackOffice 1.5 CD set I got on ebay… NT 3.51, MS Mail 3.5 & SQL 6.0!! It’s been so long, but MSSQL 6.0 was the first SQL server that I ever was payed to manage… It’s amazing how far we’ve come as an industry, and at the same point how things stay the same, although the installation of NT 3.51 is SO FAST!!!

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