Another app I wrote in May of 2006 in VB.Net, apparently my “first” app according to my comments. I’ve written others in VB.net 5.0, 6.0, and 2003 for class, but I guess this was one I actually wrote for a void I needed to fill. I worked in an IT shop dwarfed by the rest of the company. I’m sure several of you have dealt with the politics of upper management viewing IT as a monetary black hole. This was us, wanted us to make everything work, without giving us anything to work with. That’s a whole different rant, though, so I’ll cut to the good parts.

We had one system that processed orders/files/whatever, and when it crashed, processes would fail. Well, we didn’t have any sort of system monitoring, so I decided to write a simple app to ping servers and notify via e-mail if they no longer pinged. You can specify the SMTP server, but it does not do authentication, add multiple hosts, as well as several other settings. I ended up adding the e-mail address that sends SMS to my phone so I’d be notified immediately when the server crashed.

It proved to be pretty useful, so I figured I’d share:
SysAlive