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#550 - 07/18/01 04:12 PM Unattended Logging/Monitor Support
Bill_MI Offline


Registered: 07/18/01
Posts: 12
Loc: SE Michigan
I've been running PP 2.30 as an unattended monitor. First, I find it DOES work as an NT Service (Win2K/SP2 anyway) using the popular FireDaemon as the service wrapper. Some things that would really help:<br><br>Auto-Save is a great feature but I wish it had the option of updating/replacing one file of a continuous trace rather than adding files every so often. Just deleting the files previiously saved would be a big help. The idea, of course, is to just have 1 file for any continuous trace.<br><br>I didn't miss a way to do this did I? Opening an existing trace file with commandline options that's not automatically created or filename-unique just doesn't work. The Auto-Save filename options is super, though!<br><br>What I'm doing now is Auto-Saving every 15 minutes then delete the array of redundant/earlier files occasionally.<br><br>All Comments Welcomed.<br><br><br>

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#551 - 07/23/01 12:27 AM Re: Unattended Logging/Monitor Support [Re: Bill_MI]
Pete Ness Offline



Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 1106
Loc: Boise, Idaho
Thanks for the info about service success with FireDaemon!<br><br>You *can* actually have everything stored as one file - although since I don't use Ping Plotter as s service, it may be you want some additional options (let me know and I'll see if it's something already supported - or if we need to add something...).<br><br>Let's say you want to always store data into a file called "www.pingplotter.com.pp2". First off, before you start Ping Plotter as service, you need to trace to your target destination (www.pingplotter.com) and save a little bit of data as a sample file.<br><br>Now, in your service, you'd want to include this file on your command line - something like this...<br><br>pingplotter.com "www.pingplotter.com.pp2" /start<br><br>This will start Ping Plotter tracing to the destination that was used in the file.<br><br>Now, set up your data auto-save to save to this same file. You probably also want to limit the number of samples held in memory to something reasonable depending on your sample frequency, probably something like 50,000 samples - which is what I usually use.<br><br>This should start tracing using saved files when your service starts, and then auto-update that save file on the interval you specified.<br><br>

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#552 - 07/23/01 01:49 AM Re: Unattended Logging/Monitor Support [Re: Pete Ness]
Bill_MI Offline


Registered: 07/18/01
Posts: 12
Loc: SE Michigan
Hiya Pete. I'm impressed with LinkLogger so much I'm going great guns in use :-). I'm very glad to be in contact with the author.<br><br>I've put PingPlotter to the task of documenting ISP issues. What I want is to be able to go to an archive of activity, quickly.<br><br>I fully understand your process above. It's a similar amount of overhead to the process I've established. Yes, it creates 1 file but when archiving all the files will be identically named (www.pingplotter.com.pp2 in your example).<br><br>There's a catch, though. At archive time, I could change the filename to something unique then store it as an archive. At this point, I need that little bit of "sample-file" to restart it. That's a process nice to avoid!!! :-)<br><br>What I've been doing is AutoSave with the nice unique filename:<br> .\Service-Auto-Save\$host.$year$month$day-$hour$minute<br><br>Now, I have a bunch of files uniquely named in a separate directory. Whether sorted by time, date or filename they are chronically arranged. I select all except the last one and delete it, then move the last one to the archive and the name is ready to go!<br><br>I have a batch file that "hups" the PingPlotter (stops-then-starts it) so the data will collect from now on.<br><br>If you're curious about PingPlotter as a service under FireDaemon it does have one flaw that's very common when one runs many apps like this - but something you might be able to correct fairly easily. I'm no programmer but here's what I heard...<br><br>When PingPloter starts on a boot-up there is usually no SysTray to go to. This prevents interacting with desktop. I hear apps can wait for the Systray to start as a solution to this (or something like that).<br><br>So, on a Win2000 boot the PingPlotter service is running fine, saving my AutoSave files and everything... it just can't interact with the desktop of a user. It's forever a background-only service until it's restarted (my HUP bat file does this well, too!). Then, it interacts with the desktop just fine.<br><br>Another thing that would help a LOT when running as a service is to not close the entire app on the [X] - especially if the Start-in-SysTray option is used. Some apps even have a "hard-to-close" option or similar but only closing on menus is quite common. The idea is to not close the app accidentally when it's a service.<br><br>Thanks much for the reply. I'm looking forward to PingPlotter only getting better and better with time :-).<br><br>Bill<br><br><br>

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