Jones: The Network Monitor
Who is he, and what can he do?
- Keeps track machine ping times
- Handy when you want to be notified when a host goes up or down
- When a machine is going up and down constantly, you have a nice audit trail to help in diagnosing the problem in conjunction with system logs
- Much the same as the billion or so (just a rough guess) of other machine monitoring programs. It’s free and simple though.
Setting Jones up
Start Jones up, and choose Options > Host List. In this dialog you setup what hosts you want to monitor. Fill out all the fields on the right, and click `Add/Update’. The new entry will appear on the left. If you want to delete a monitor, select it and hit `Remove’. To edit an existing entry, select it make the changes you want on the right and then click `Add/Update’. In this version there is only one Alert method, which is for a message box to popup when a host goes down. If you select this, enter what you want to appear in the message box in the `Alert option’ text box. Click `Ok’ when you are happy with the setup, or `Cancel’ if you want to abort the setup.
Now you can setup where you want Jones to log it’s output to, and the ping delay. Ping delay is measured in minutes, and the minimum is one minute. Log to should have a full file path (e.g. c:log.txt). By checking `Auto-cycle’, the program will automatically cycle the status display of hosts in the plain view.
Using Jones
Once you have completed the setup, select Tools > Activate. Note that you can also access the in-built trace route from here as well. If you select Tools > Telnet, a dialog will popup asking you where you want to telnet to and it will start your default telnet client with that host. Once activated, a timer will show in the status bar. It will count up to your specified ping delay time and then ping all the hosts in the list.
To pause/stop the pinging, just select Tools > Activate again so the tick has gone.
HINT: If you want to force an early ping, click the underlying window (e.g., the grey between the listbox and the status frame).
Here is Jones in action. Auto-cycle is selected, so Jones will keep switching between my hosts every couple of seconds to show me the latest status. The current ping time for a host is shown to the right of their name in the left list box. This view is the `Plain’ view – to change it, use the View menu.
HINT: Right click on a host to use the context-sensitive tools.
If you are curious enough to select the `Report’ view, the window to the left is what you see. Offline hosts are shown with a different icon than alive hosts. In this view, you see all information for all hosts. You can resize and re position columns at your will, but they will not be saved for your next session :(. This view also has the right click tools menu.
If you select `Traceroute’ from either the context-sensitive popup menu or from the tools menu, you can do some tracin’. By ticking the `Resolve IPs’ box, Jones will try to get the hostnames for each machine in the trace. A very basic way of describing a trace route is a way of working out how your machine (A) gets information to another machine (B) – it (usually) reveals all the machines in between A and B. This is sometimes helpful in seeing why a ping is failing, perhaps a vital machine in between A and B has gone down – a traceroute will show this. Just because a machine is no longer responding to pings, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s `offline’, the physical network link between your machine and the target may be down.
Trace routes are not foolproof, and sometimes show misleading results, but 90% of the time they work well. If you don’t trust what Jones is telling you, use another traceroute client (such as tracert or traceroute) to check (I’m yet to see any differences in results).
Download
Jones (1.6MB bloated installer)
PS: The name ‘Jones’ is the name for the l33t dolphin in the book Johnny Mnemonic by William Gibson.
2. June 2003More stuff in: code
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