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Revision: 1.31
Committed: Sat Jun 1 13:29:25 2002 UTC (21 years, 10 months ago) by tdb
Branch: MAIN
Changes since 1.30: +38 -21 lines
Log Message:
Updated the Project News and Current Work webpages.

File Contents

# Content
1
2 <!--
3 $Author: tdb $
4 $Id: contents.inc,v 1.30 2002/05/18 16:44:41 tdb Exp $
5 -->
6
7 <table border="0" width="500">
8 <tr>
9 <td>
10 <font size="2" face="arial,sans-serif">
11
12 <center><h3>Project News</h3></center>
13
14 <p align="justify">
15 <b>Saturday 1 June 2002</b><br><br>
16 Work has now been finished on a new ihost written in C. This has
17 been in the pipeline for a long time, and we're glad to see an
18 efficient host at last! Credit goes to our new developer
19 <a href="/who.shtml">Pete</a>. Until we update the downloads
20 pages you can download the new ihost
21 <a href="http://kernow.ukc.ac.uk/snapshots/ihost-1.0rc1.tar.gz">
22 here</a>.
23 </p>
24
25 <p align="justify">
26 <b>Tuesday 21 May 2002</b><br><br>
27 We've finally put the finishing touches to the new
28 <a href="http://rrdtool.eu.org">RRDtool</a> based graphing system.
29 It's working well, and has done away with the MySQL database
30 backend which took up far too many resources. This new system
31 generates the graphs in a more realtime nature, allowing more
32 flexible graphs to be generated. This is currently only available
33 through <a href="http://www.i-scream.org.uk/cgi-bin/cvs/viewcvs.cgi/cms/source/reports/rrdgraphing/"
34 CVS</a>.
35 </p>
36
37 <p align="justify">
38 <b>Saturday 18 May 2002</b><br><br>
39 The i-scream central monitoring system is now <a href="/license.shtml">
40 licensed under the GNU Public License. We are currently working
41 to make full downloads, including source, available on this site.
42 </p>
43
44 <p align="justify">
45 <b>Thursday 7 Feb 2002</b><br><br>
46 The alerting section of the i-scream central monitoring system
47 now makes full use of an externally developed IRC bot for it's IRC
48 connectivity. To find out more about this IRC bot, please visit
49 the author's website at <a href="http://www.jibble.org">
50 http://www.jibble.org</a>.
51 </p>
52
53 <p align="justify">
54 <b>Tuesday 8 Jan 2002</b><br><br>
55 Java ACL (Access Control List) code has been added to the util
56 package of the i-scream server. This code will ultimately allow
57 the server to be more secure when exposed to the Internet. More
58 details can be found <a href="http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/people/staff/tdb/#acl">
59 here</a> on the author's website.
60 </p>
61
62 <p>&nbsp;</p>
63 <center><h3>About i-scream</h3></center>
64
65 <p align="justify">
66 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-alerter-email.gif" width="100" height="107" align="left"></a>
67 Details of the i-scream central monitoring system can be found
68 on the <b><a href="features.shtml">features and overview</a></b> page.
69 A variety of <b><a href="screenshots">screen shots</a></b> from the
70 system show some of the key features in use. The <b><a href="reports">reports demo</a></b>
71 page provides a static example of what the i-scream reports (alerts,
72 historical graphs, and live data) could look like on a production system.
73 </p>
74
75 <p align="justify">
76 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-conient-main.gif" width="100" height="107" align="right"></a>
77 The latest source code is available in the <b><a href="cvs.shtml">CVS</a></b>
78 repository, with binary downloads on the downloads page. The
79 <b><a href="documentation">documentation</a></b> page has details of
80 installation, use and maintenance for the end user and developer.
81 We value feedback and comments from you, so please drop us an e-mail
82 to <a href="mailto:dev@i-scream.org.uk">dev@i-scream.org.uk</a>.
83 </p>
84
85 <p>&nbsp;</p>
86 <center><h3>Current Work</h3></center>
87
88 <p align="justify">
89 <b>Extending monitoring facilites</b><br><br>
90 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-reports-raptor-load15.gif" width="100" height="107" align="left"></a>
91 Work is continuing, in conjunction with the new ihost, to extend
92 the range of i-scream's monitoring. Currently we are adding new
93 features to more accurately monitoring memory and swap usage,
94 along with more disk statistics. We are also planning to improve
95 the rather basic service monitors which are currently in place.
96 </p>
97
98 <p align="justify">
99 <b>Server security</b><br><br>
100 Security was something mostly overlooked in the original stage
101 of this project (due to the academic nature of the work). However,
102 once in production use this has become an issue, and is being
103 addressed. Initially the plan is to lock down the external points
104 of access (TCP & UDP) in the server to specific hosts. In the
105 longer term, encryption of data would be nice, but would take a
106 lot more time and work.
107 </p>
108
109 <p align="justify">
110 <b>Testing and Development</b><br><br>
111 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-winhost-main.gif" width="100" height="62" align="right"></a>
112 The i-scream system is being tested and developed within the
113 Univeristy of Kent Computer Science department by the Systems
114 Group. This has led to many bug fixes and minor feature
115 enhancements, and will hopefully help to aid the long term
116 development of the system.
117 </p>
118
119 <p>&nbsp;</p>
120 <center><h3>Project History</h3></center>
121
122 <p align="justify">
123 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-reports-raptor-latest-misc.gif" width="100" height="104" align="left"></a>
124 The i-scream Distributed Central Monitoring System started off as
125 a final year project for a group of <a href="http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk">
126 Computer Science</a> students at the <a href="http://www.ukc.ac.uk">
127 University of Kent at Canterbury</a>, UK. The project was completed at
128 4pm on 29 March 2001. It consisted of five lever-arch folders containing
129 mostly source code and documentation. The CVS repository was tagged to
130 signify this even, however, the project is still being developed by the
131 <a href="acknowledgements.shtml">core development team</a>.
132 </p>
133
134 <p align="justify">
135 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-ihost-main.gif" width="100" height="51" align="right"></a>
136 As can be seen in our &quot;<a href="/probdomain.shtml">problem domain</a>&quot; document, the project
137 was aimed at the UKC Computer Science department, and as such
138 we believed that a demonstration to the &quot;customer&quot; was important. The
139 feedback from our demonstation was more positive than we had
140 anticipated. We believe that the system may now be of interest
141 to anybody who wishes to monitor a number of machines on their
142 network using a central configuration. The i-scream central
143 monitoring system is now being used by the UKC Computer Science
144 department, and their feedback is being used to further improve
145 the product.
146 </p>
147
148 <p align="justify">
149 <a href="screenshots/"><img border="0" src="screenshots/thumbnail-conient-config.gif" width="100" height="48" align="left"></a>
150 The name <i>i-scream</i> arose from a meeting whereupon one member
151 of the <a href="acknowledgements.shtml">development team</a> felt a strange urge to draw an ice cream on the discussion board.
152 It later became apparent that we had no name for our project (other
153 than 'The Project'). It seemed only natural to name our project after
154 the ice cream that had been oh-so-randomly drawn on the white board.
155 Copyright issues immediately ruled out anything involving Mr Whippy,
156 so we had to settle for <i>i-scream</i>. And thus, we were left with a cunning
157 play on words - it still sounded like <i>ice cream</i>, yet also
158 served as a functional description of our system - namely, one which
159 screams at somebody if something has gone wrong...
160 </p>
161 <p align="justify">
162
163 <p>&nbsp;</p>
164 <center><h3>Searching i-scream</h3></center>
165
166 <!-- Search Google -->
167 <center>
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186 <!-- Search Google -->
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188 </p>
189 </font>
190 </td>
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192 </table>