(tivo) server ping alert

[marklyn]

I know there are big fancy commercial programs out there that will monitor many aspects of a network server.

Wonder if anyone here would know of a simple little program I could run on my desktop computer that would occasionally ping all of my tivo's and, when one doesn't ping back, send a sms message, send an email message or alert me. I don't want something that's a big install with a ton of features that might be more applicable to a big network server environment... just something to alert me if one of my tivo's freezes.

Not sure what I could do if I'm out of town or something but if one of my tivo's locks up while I'm here it'd be nice to know that so I can restart it and not chance missing a recording. I'm not talking about a constant ping, maybe one per hour, every two hours or like that.

[rbautch]

I know there are big fancy commercial programs out there that will monitor many aspects of a network server.

Wonder if anyone here would know of a simple little program I could run on my desktop computer that would occasionally ping all of my tivo's and, when one doesn't ping back, send a sms message, send an email message or alert me. I don't want something that's a big install with a ton of features that might be more applicable to a big network server environment... just something to alert me if one of my tivo's freezes.

Not sure what I could do if I'm out of town or something but if one of my tivo's locks up while I'm here it'd be nice to know that so I can restart it and not chance missing a recording. I'm not talking about a constant ping, maybe one per hour, every two hours or like that.Instead of pinging your tivo from you pc, it might be easier to ping your PC from your tivo. Alphawolf's all-one-utilities contain a ping binary that can do just that. Then set up a cron job to ping your router every hour, and if that fails, do something like email, page, or show on-screen message. I don't know how to make the tivo email you, but Cheer's tivo apparently pages him.

[marklyn]

There are tons of server ping utilities out there, many of them very elaborate and very extensive in features.

I found a basic server ping program that I keep running on my weather station laptop (which runs 95% of the time). The program is called 'isitup' (don't laugh).

It let's me configure alerts for all of my tivos, frequency of pings and when/how to alert me after a pre-determined number of pings fail. Simple and sweet and I've been using it for a day or two now and it works perfectly!

If anyone is interested:
http://www2.tarosoft.com:8080/isitup.htm

peace.