LabMonitor / News: Recent posts

A tool for administrators to remotely monitor the states of computers they oversee. LabMonitor provides information including how long the computer has been running, who is currently logged on, who was previously logged on, activity status (asleep, awake, dead, unknown), current date, OS version. LabMonitor can also log all this information to a file, and give audio cues as to state-changes. LabMonitor has been used for many years to administrate public clusters of Win98/Win2k/WinXP/Debian machines, and it has proven, among other things, to be useful for everything from spotting crashed machines to preventing vandalism. LabMonitor consists of two parts: a Server (generally written in C) to be installed on all computers to be monitored, and a java Client (written in Java to be accessed via a webpage) that displays the status of the remote servers. The server (currently only available for Windows, but fully runnable under WINE for linux, and intended to eventually be ported natively to all platforms) has a small footprint, and is generally installed (when the option is available) as an automatic background service, although it can also be run in the foreground.