Fried Bumblebee’s windows install. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it occured immediately after installing and running The Suffering: Ties That Bind once – StarForce 3 really is a pain in the ass.
The good news? My visual studio project files are all on a flash drive for that reason – pc’s been on-edge for the last month or so, so having them on a flash drive prevented me from being unable to back them up.
Downside is VS2008 ain’t on here yet, but it will be. SysAlive 3 RC5 (possibly V1) is gunna be pushed back a few days because of that obviously, but it’s still on its way.
I’m having a ***** of a time getting username/password authentication working on .net 2.0. I’m still working on it, but if anyone’s ever done SMTP authentication with .net 2.0 in c#, lemme know, PLEASE!
Released. I forget how many bugs I fixed but under the config menu there’s now stuff for email. FYI, whatever email host you’re using has to support anonymous logins, cause I haven’t figured out how to add in a username and password yet. It’s on the to-do list, hopefully I’ll figure it out.
But enough yappin’ – DA LINKS!
SysAlive 3 RC3 Installer [Removed, RC4's coming in minutes]
SysAlive 3 RC3 Zip [Removed, RC4's coming in minutes]
^ Installer’s thanks to Inno Setup and an X10Hosting staff member who pointed it out to me. Thanks ScottD!
Got bug reports? Drop me a comment, or email me: 
Got the hard disks pulled out of Mediabox and it seems that is NOT why it was crashing, so meh. I’m not sure whats dieing but I’m gutting it for whats useful (read: cd burner, hard drive, and wifi pci card), and calling it quits with that box.
Which means I can FINALLY get back to making sure RC3 is ready to go. I already killed the links in the old 2 RC topics. I figure it’d be annoying to download RC2 then have RC3 come out the same day.
Peace until it’s ready folks!
Mediabox is pretty well FUBAR so I’m not exactly in the best of moods right now; I’m gunna be moving the hd out of that system to this one for some debugging – hoping it’s not a faulty drive since it’s mostly full.
Other than that, SysAlive rc3’s running well on this system and was working fine with WS2003 until the system that was running it decided to go and commit seppuku by way of System Error: Stop. So look for that over the next day or two, I’m trying to get it repacked and ready for shipping.
So for now, this is Livewire saying good night, and happy computing!
Just like the title says; I got myself Windows Server 2003 and it’s running just dandy-fine on the Enterprise Edition installer. Only hitch is .net 2.0 isn’t considered to be an update, so those who want to run it on WS2003 need to get .net 2.0 and install it manually.
Still working on the last few glitches that have popped up. Nothing big, I’m just trying my darndest to NOT have an RC with bugs if I can avoid them 
Stay tuned!
…is in the next SysAlive release candidate (rc3 for those keeping track).
Gotta thank Majick in the X10Hosting Offtopic IRC channel for this one: Emailed Notifications. I’m still ironing out a bug with it (I can’t get it to allow server authentication for ones that don’t support anonymous logins for sending emails) but otherwise it’s working fine. Sends updates every 15 minutes if there’s at least 1 server marked as Offline (to avoid spam it’s defaulting to Don’t Send Updates For Warnings – you don’t need to know when it might be down, you need to know when it IS down). Thanks again, Majick!
Also, for those who hate the X = Minimize To Tray fix I put in RC2, thank Sharky – it’s now a Confirm Close instead of minimize so if you hit X it’ll ask if you want it to close or not. Plus at the same time I found a way to make it NOT hang Windows when the system is shutting down – it used to abort the shutdown if it wasn’t closed by File>Exit or RightClick>Exit, which would mean as the OS shuts down the program would abort and essentially stop the shutdown. When I was looking for how to detect shutdown by that X, I found how to detect it by OS Shutdown as well, so if it’s being closed by the OS it’ll shut down normally. The log entry is a bit different though.
So that’s about it for now, just giving out a progress report while I get the last few known SA3 RC2 bugs ironed out before tossing out RC3. Stay frosty people!
Edit: Emailed Notification suggestion by Majick, added his name in the post.
So brilliant ol’ me decided to go and try coding an application to control/monitor certain enabled programs, such as SysAlive 3. The main bonus was supposed to be being able to check a certain webpage or file for a list of current MD5 hashes of all the supported apps (or at least their version numbers) in order to determine if updates were available or not.
I found a problem with that idea I’ll need to sort out though. It seems the way c# works, I need to have the process LAUNCHED from said monitoring program – I currently can’t find a way that lets the monitoring app run separate from the initial application. So rather than having SA3 running first then you run LWHQ Suite Updater, you’d have to run LWHQ Suite Updater and it’d proceed to launch SA3. Frankly that sucks so I’m going to be mucking about with this for sometime.
If you’ve got a way to make it so I can monitor SA3’s StandardInput, StandardOutput, and StandardError StreamReader/Writer’s without having to start the app from the updater, please register and drop in a comment (it’ll get stuck in a moderation queue but I’ll definitely read/approve it if it’s even SLIGHTLY useful).
But for now, I must go sell shoes. Later folks!
Just cause I’m feeling generous. Click for bigger image on the second one.
What happens when the server dies?
The main UI - I know Last 5 Events shows 6+ in the window, screen was taken before I fixed the glitch.
I might just get this done soon ^_^
Edited 5am: configuration menu’s about half done (icons and sounds aren’t configurable yet, but the dialog’s face time, fade time, and fade speed are all configurable, along with the delay, timeout, and maximum alerts for the servers).
Features as of right now:
- Core is made of Awesome
- Tray icon has 4 graphics; one for normal, one as an alternate image for flashing, one for when there’s servers in warn status and one for when there’s servers in alert status.
- Saving and Loading is done and compatible with the old SysAlive files, minus a few useless things the other one stored (such as HC for an addon I never finished)
- Able to choose between ConnectOnly (the old SysAlive style) and HTTP (the New and Improved SysAlive style) on a server-by-server basis. HTTP will attempt to download the page served by the server and search for a <body tag; if it finds it, great, server’s online. If it doesn’t, it means one of two things: Either the webpage is throwing an error and it doesn’t have a fancy error page with a <body> tag in it, or the server’s down. Either way, SA3′ll mark it as dead since any good page shouldn’t be returning errors anyways.
- Annoying Sound Effects. Yes, I brought these back; nothing like being awoken out of a sound sleep to some of the loudest sound effects you want to be woken up with when a server is offline
So yeah, the to-do list still has some stuff on it that was considered “standard” in the old SysAlive (minimize to tray, automatically loading the Servers.XML on startup), but those are generally fairly easy to do. The help file for this on the other hand…Not so much.
*clippy!*Â Hit this plz: http://livewire90210.com/wordpress/tag/sysalive/ There are updates to the status of SysAlive 3, and that link will get you to all of them, including the latest release information.
For legacy/archive reasons, the rest of the post is here, but it is indeed available.
But seriously, I’m starting to love and hate Google all at the same time. Three hours of code got squashed by 30 seconds of copy/paste to make it do one notch better than it used to – in particular, it used to only be able to check if it could open a connection to a website.
Now it downloads the page that website serves, the theory being if it connects and is able to get the page, the server is not only able to accept connections, but is ALSO able to actually serve pages. I’ve seen x10’s (my paid hosting company) free servers do similar, where Apache is up and running but so bogged down or overloaded that it actually can’t serve pages anymore. SysAlive 2 would say it’s online, whereas SysAlive 3 would bail out and call it down or non-responsive.
No ETA on it yet though. I’ve still gotta do a bunch of things I took for granted on the original, namely the alert popups, sounds (which needed tweaking anyways), XML read/write, and some basic program settings, and minimize to tray…I should make a to-do list so I don’t actually miss anything.
And on the subject, why is it that I can’t code for ****? I’m having to spend lots of time just translating my own code from the old SysAlive to something with comments that I can actually use.
