We are new to Simon and are establishing ways of using it to our advantage.

We manage an Education network of around 20 High School servers and around 150 Primary School Mac servers. These servers all provide AFP/ODM for Mac and a Primary Domain Controller for PCs.

The most common issues we have to deal with are failures of AFP, SMB, and LDAP. We want to be able to detect these as quickly as possible.

As it stands Simon doesn't appear to feature built-in tests for AFP and LDAP. Additionally the built-in SMB test utilises the Samba client which, as far as I was last informed by Apple, isn't the code used by the Finder (the relevance of this will become apparent). I appreciate that Windows uses neither the Samba SMB client nor the Finder's method.

We are attempting to construct tests for these. Rather than use a shell script, which may bypass code that the Finder uses, we chose to use AppleScript for the AFP and SMB tests. Keeping it simple and ensuring we use the same frameworks the system itself would be using here's what we're using:

tell application "Finder"
mount volume "afp://{Username}:{Password}@{ServerIP}/{TestShare}"
delay 5
eject disk "{TestShare}"
end tell

Interchange "afp://" and "smb://" in the above for the SMB test.

We've setup dedicated test share points and a Simon test account on each server. Each test share has a unique name to avoid the eject command failing.

This works for the most part, but we're seeing almost random failures in this method. Perhaps timing clashes. Finder issues. Sometimes Simon and/or the Finder appears to lock-up after it has been running for several hours. If an error occurs then Simon can't continue and begins to think that failures are occuring "all over the shop". We are having to "babysit" Simon on a daily basis.

Is it a case of missing error detection and correction in our script? Does anyone have any suggestions for how to better handle this?

For the LDAP test we're trying a simple query with the ldapsearch command combined with the smart change detection. It seems to work ok for the moment. Should we perhaps be using dscl for this?

Can I suggest building in good AFP and LDAP tests in the future? Have you considered it already but found it difficult to find the best method like us? Perhaps Simon could tie into the AppleShareClient framework?

We have not yet begun trying to support the 150 primary servers yet. I am beginning to think that our AFP/SMB method is not going to work at all for such a large number of tests. How can we do these tests reliably with 170 systems???

Thanks in advance.