I have fail/recover notifiers that send SMS messages to my phone (send email to mymobilenumber@vtext.com). I don't want to receive the notifications in the middle of the night, so I set both notifiers to automatically pause "Every Day" from 22:00:00 to 06:00:00.

However, I still receive failure SMS messages at 1am or 2am in the morning. I thought perhaps there was a 24/0 hour rollover problem, so I changed it to two notifiers, one from 22:00:00 to 23:59:59 and one from 00:00:01 to 06:00:00. Still, I again seem to receive failure SMS messages in the middle of the night.

The failure notifier (for example) is set to notify on failure, after 2 consecutive errors, with the "Only notify once for each failure" option set/checked. It's an "E-mail" notifier w/ pretty straight forward field contents.

In checking the failure log, I see lots of

Timeout: Check failed to complete in time limit

messages. But I guess these are "normal" as I see them in the user's guide examples.

However, in trying to correlate the "ill-timed" notifications (middle of the night) with failures as indicated in the respective logs, I see that the ill-timed notifications appear to be coming shortly after NSError messages such as the following:

NSError "POSIX error: Operation Timed Out" Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=60
NSError "POSIX error: Connection refused" Domain=NSPOSIXErrorDomain Code=61

Any idea what's up?

This is with Simon 2.2.2 running on OS X 10.4.9. The test in question (that is resulting in the ill-timed notifications) is an SMTP test of an OS X Server machine running 10.4.9.

Using google I found one other mention of this NSError.

Where they say "Basically the details of the bug are as follows, it always comes late at night, sometimes when I'm asleep, but mostly when my internet connection is flakey." Hmmm....

Thanks,
--greg

I'd like to be able to edit certain Test variables simultaneously. For example, I would like to set the automatically pause option on all my tests. I'd rather not have to manually go through every single one manually.

Thanks.

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.

I have a bunch of tests set to run every 15 minutes, but after about an hour of monitoring, the "Next Check" column shows a status of "Waiting" for all checks, meaning that Simon has effectively stopped checking.

I can't find this status anywhere in the docs (so far). If I quit and restart Simon, checking resums "as expected".

TIA, Steve

I am having the licensing dialogs pop up EVERY SINGLE DAY and it is driving me crazy. I dutifully click the "I have a license" and the "Finish" button (as my "Enterprise" license already appears in the licensing dialog) and ... it comes back the next day. What is going on??

I actually just noticed a line on the second dialog: "Simon Needs an Upgrade License?" So I need to upgrade, huh? The licensing scheme seems a bit diffuse... (I enjoy licensing schemes that treat me like a criminal as well).

...and I had to post on the forum instead of mailing tech support directly... because their email address is... where...?