- Current Status
+ Project News
-
- All i-scream components now function to initial
- design parameters and our system is regarded to be complete.
- Documentation is available to assist third party programmers
- in producing Hosts for use with the i-scream server.
- Our progress during the project can be found in the meeting minutes.
- Code is viewable via CVS to local users only.
+ Wednesday 11 February 2004
+ libstatgrab 0.8.2 has been released.
-
-
- The i-scream Distributed Central Monitoring System Reports
- are now visible on the web. If you are not a local user, then you may
- view some of the output in the screen shots section or you may view some
- static example content on the Reports Demo pages.
- You may view the latest information about each machine, historical 24-hour
- reports and alerts for each machine. Our own i-scream server is running constantly,
- along with several hosts to enable plenty of data harvesting. If you would
- like your i-scream web reports to be linked from this site, then please email us
- at dev@i-scream.org.uk
+ Tuesday 15 July 2003
+ We have moved the i-scream support and bug tracking to a new
+ facility on the i-scream server. For further details please
+ see this page.
+
+
+ Sunday 8 June 2003
+ The i-scream website, email, and cvs facilities are now all
+ run from a FreeBSD server.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+ Tuesday 4 February 2003
+ Over the coming week we will be making snapshot builds of the
+ i-scream central monitoring system from the CVS repository.
+ These builds will have quite a few changes from the downloads
+ currently available (a document detailing them will be
+ released later on), so please give them a whirl. We would be
+ grateful if you contacted
+ us with any questions or bugs.
+ The downloads will be available on our snapshot server :-
+
+ http://snapshots.i-scream.org/.
+
-
- Our current host development allows us to pass machine statistics
- to our distributed filter arrangement, which then processes the
- data and stores it for later use. An example of such use is the
- historical report generator which produces graphs of machine
- usage over periods of time. A real-time
- client is also available (Conient) and alert information can be
- displayed to the public via dynamic web pages.
+ Saturday 1 June 2002
+ Work has now been finished on a new ihost written in C. This has
+ been in the pipeline for a long time, and we're glad to finally
+ see an efficient native host! Credit goes to our new developer
+ Pete. Until we update the downloads
+ pages you can download the new ihost
+
+ here.
+
+
+ Tuesday 21 May 2002
+ We've finally put the finishing touches to the new
+ RRDtool based graphing system.
+ It's working well, and has done away with the MySQL database
+ backend which took up far too many resources. This new system
+ generates the graphs in a more realtime nature, allowing more
+ flexible graphs to be generated. This is currently only available
+ through
+ CVS.
+
+
+
+ Tuesday 8 Jan 2002
+ Java ACL (Access Control List) code has been added to the util
+ package of the i-scream server. This code will ultimately allow
+ the server to be more secure when exposed to the Internet. More
+ details can be found
+ here on the author's website.
+
+
+ About i-scream
+
-
- The latest builds of the i-scream Distributed Central Monitoring System
- are now available for download from this
- website. To assist in our addition of features to the system, we
- would be extremely grateful to receive feedback from anybody who has
- any comments about the system. You may email the development team
- at dev@i-scream.org.uk
+
+ Details of the i-scream central monitoring system can be found
+ on the features and overview page.
+ A variety of screen shots from the
+ system show some of the key features in use. The reports demo
+ page provides a static example of what the i-scream reports (alerts,
+ historical graphs, and live data) could look like on a production system.
+
+
+
+ The latest source code is available in the CVS
+ repository, with binary downloads on the downloads page. The
+ documentation page has details of
+ installation, use and maintenance for the end user and developer.
+ We value feedback and comments from you, so please drop us an e-mail
+ to dev@i-scream.org.
+
+
+
+ Current Work
+
+
+ Extending monitoring facilites
+
+ Work is continuing, in conjunction with the new ihost, to extend
+ the range of i-scream's monitoring. Currently we are adding new
+ features to more accurately monitoring memory and swap usage,
+ along with more disk statistics. We are also planning to improve
+ the rather basic service monitors which are currently in place.
+ There are also many more subtle changes that need to be made to
+ improve the reliability and usefulness of i-scream's monitoring.
+
+
+ Server security
+ Security was something mostly overlooked in the original stage
+ of this project (due to the academic nature of the work). However,
+ once in production use this has become an issue, and is being
+ addressed. Initially the plan is to lock down the external points
+ of access (TCP & UDP) in the server to specific hosts. In the
+ longer term, encryption of data would be nice, but would take a
+ lot more time and work.
+
+
+
+ Testing and Development
+
+ The i-scream system is being tested and developed within the
+ Univeristy of Kent Computer Science department by the Systems
+ Group. This has led to many bug fixes and minor feature
+ enhancements, and will hopefully help to aid the long term
+ development of the system.
+
+
- Project Completion
+ Project History
The i-scream Distributed Central Monitoring System started off as
- a final year project for a group of Computer Science students at
- the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK.
- The project deadline was 4pm on 29th March 2001. Most of the group
- met very early that morning to compile the project into five
- lever arch folders. The project, consisting of source code, user,
- maintenance and other documents, was handed in at 3pm. The CVS
- repository was tagged to signify the project's completion, however,
- the project is still being developed by the core development team
- as we have found the system to be very useful in practice. We would
- love to hear of ideas for extra features that we may include in the
- next builds.
+ a final year project for a group of
+ Computer Science students at the
+ University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. The project was completed at
+ 4pm on 29 March 2001. It consisted of five lever-arch folders containing
+ mostly source code and documentation. The CVS repository was tagged to
+ signify this even, however, the project is still being developed by the
+ core development team.
@@ -82,14 +158,14 @@
was aimed at the UKC Computer Science department, and as such
we believed that a demonstration to the "customer" was important. The
feedback from our demonstation was more positive than we had
- anticipated. We believe that the system may now be of great
- interest to anybody who wishes to monitor a number of machines
- on their network using a central configuration.
+ anticipated. We believe that the system may now be of interest
+ to anybody who wishes to monitor a number of machines on their
+ network using a central configuration. The i-scream central
+ monitoring system is now being used by the UKC Computer Science
+ department, and their feedback is being used to further improve
+ the product.
-
- Naming History
-
The name i-scream arose from a meeting whereupon one member
@@ -100,11 +176,36 @@
Copyright issues immediately ruled out anything involving Mr Whippy,
so we had to settle for i-scream. And thus, we were left with a cunning
play on words - it still sounded like ice cream, yet also
- served as a functional decription of our system - namely, one which
+ served as a functional description of our system - namely, one which
screams at somebody if something has gone wrong...
-
+
+
+ Searching i-scream
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
|