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Restarting Webservers

Wed, 2010-09-01 00:01 — mdoher1

Hi,

I am a newbie to this particular product and forgive me if this question has been asked before...

I'd potentially like to use this software to first detect and notify me when a particular web server has gone down...but what would be cool is if it could then trigger a restart of that web server (whether it is IIS, Apache or whatever) so that the site is then back up and running.

I've used apps such as IPMonitor in the past and they provide this sort of functionality...although at a much higher cost.

Is this possible with Simon at the moment? If not...perhaps some plug-ins could be written to allow this.

Regards,

Mark

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Wed, 2010-09-01 12:48 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Restarting Webservers

Hi Mark,

That depends on where the web server is hosted. If it's on a local server, hooked to an APC Masterswitch managed power supply, you could use the APC Masterswitch notifier to reboot that server.

Or if the machine isn't entirely unresponsive, it might be feasible to SSH into it and restart processes that way — either via a Port- or Script-based session.

Others may have other suggestions, too.

Wed, 2010-09-01 15:01 — mdoher1

Re: Restarting Webservers

Hi David,

Thanks for the quick reply.

I was thinking more along the lines of the ability to restart the software...for example, I have had a web based application running in IIS and it has stopped responding to page requests (essentially the asp/.net seemed to be going to sleep)...hitting the restart button for IIS stops then restarted the service and the app came back to life. A bit of a pain...and down to bad code, but when the site is needed to run 24x7...it is better than me getting up at 4am to do the honours.

It would be great if this software had some plugins that could 'talk' to the different webserver software to restart it (I realise that it may need remote client software to sit on the target machines).

By the way...Simon is a great piece of software and I am really impressed with the first 24 hours I have had it! Keep up the good work!

Regards,

Mark

Wed, 2010-09-01 15:09 — David Sinclair
David Sinclair's picture

Re: Restarting Webservers

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the kind words; I'm glad you like Simon.

I don't really have the ability to write software to run on the server machines, but would certainly be willing to help someone else write such a thing; I can provide Simon's plugin API to an interested developer.

Without that, if you have the ability to remotely connect to the server via a command line, it should be possible to send it a suitable command. Anything you can do in Terminal you can probably do in Simon.

Sorry I'm not familiar with the specifics of such server apps to be able to help more than that.