Subject: Re: Utility Needed
From: Dave Gilinsky <[email-masked]>
To: William Walter Ford <[email-masked]>
Cc: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 22:57:31 -0700 (MST)

On Thu, 23 Feb 1995, William Walter Ford wrote:

> My office is fully wired to the net as is my personal machine....
> I was thinking a simple script - maybe get LW to write to a datafile the 
> last frame rendered, how long it took, and the time it wrote it....one 
> thing it'll have to be able to do is write over to another machine on the 
> net in our office, since when my machine renders or locks up - it can't 
> be accessed via ftp or telnet.  I'm justed looking to in some way be able 
> to decide if my machine is rendering still or if it has crashed...
> 

I believe that Interworks has some software that will call your
alpha-numeric pager with rendering statistics at intervals or in the event
of rendering machine failure. 
 
Our solution to the mid-night rendering machine crash problem is a shell
script running on one of the Unix boxes that pings every machine on our
local network every 60 seconds.  If a machines doesn't respond, the
script uses a free modem line to dial either a cell phone or a pager.  
You don't get any fancy rendering stats, but you do get alerted within 60 
seconds of a crash, so you can come in and mop up.;)

						Dave Gilinsky (DG75)
						Pixel Dust, Inc.
						[email-masked]
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