“Are you having trouble keeping your network under control?
Here is an introduction to NOCOL: the freeware network monitoring
system which will help you keep instability at bay.”
“NOCOL, Network Operation Center On-Line, enables a designated
machine to host a collection of network monitoring agents. These
agents can perform a variety of tasks, from checking that a machine
is “up” using the ICMP ping method to ensuring that a remote web
server is operating as it should by requesting a test page. This
allows problems on a network to be diagnosed and reported in a
variety of ways, be it by e-mail, web page or dedicated
terminal.”
“As an example of NOCOL’s flexibility, I coded an extension to
the notifier tool, which utilized our internal SMS messaging
system. This allowed text messages describing CRITICAL problems to
be sent to my mobile phone. This was done by coding an e-mail
front-end to the SMS gateway, so all notifer had to do was fire off
an e-mail in the correct format.”
“In essence, NOCOL has proven itself to be an extremely useful
tool. It has alerted us to network problems as soon as they
occurred, and the fact that it is freeware (it comes under a
“not-quite-GPL” agreement) is just another example of great
software under Linux being available for no cost.”