monitoring a remote machine / software suggestions ?

D

djbeta

Registered
Hi,

I'd like to buy a new mac mini to serve as a web and file server.
It will be fairly important for the machine to be operational 100% of the time, or as close to it as possible.

The machine will be headless and remote and not so easy to get to.

Could anyone suggest any software out there that might assist me in monitoring the machine. Obviously I can remote desktop to it, etc.
But I was hoping for something a little better... like perhaps, a once per hour "system is OK" email... or, an email to indicate that something (like a backup) has gone wrong.

I'm not a real super techy person .. so any non applescript / automator / unix solutions would be appreciated.

Also, I intend to have the system constantly backed up to a local mirrored drive using SoftRaid. Any suggestions on that front ??

thanks.
 
VNC would be a good remote management tool, it's like remote desktop, but free.

As for emails and stuff.. I don't know. Someone will though.
 
You _will_ probably want to go AppleScript. It's simple, really. Just let AppleScript send you an E-Mail every hour or so, and if it comes in on time, all's good. On top of that VNC seems like the cheapest (because free) way to go.
 
thanks for all the comments so far..
I'm not afraid of building the applescript.. but I guess rather than reinvent the wheel, if there *is* a decent, cheap os x software that will provide some basic monitoring I would prefer to go with that..

I checked out http://www.inxoutmonitor.com which has great ratings, but holy toledo, they want $179 per year. That's way above my budget.
 
Mac OS X Server has a lot of this built in -- fault tolerance, warning emails, etc... in addition to VNC, it may be all you need.
 
I use ZoneEdit to host my DNS.

They have a failover service that reroutes requests to a secondary place if your server is down/unable to serve pages.

So I created a Site Unavailable page at one of those free hosting places and used that as the secondary. This doesn't keep my site available, but at least users get an error screen explaining what's going on.
 
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