IIS Aid

It has been a while since I posted any news on this site, and for this I apologize. Not that I ever have much of interest to say anyway. However, just because no news has been posted, doesn't mean there hasn't been anything going on. Infact, there are three noteworthy events that have happened since I posted my last news item, all of which are based around site content, layout and statistics.Firstly is the obvious addition of Google Ads. Now before you start throwing rocks at me, I'm not a huge fan of sites running advertisements myself. However, as all the costs, effort and everything that goes with running this site are currently met by me, this is just a means of offsetting that cost slightly. To give you an idea, this site currently costs me over $100AUD a month for the internet connection, let alone the servers, UPS, backup drive, routers, and all the other hardware that is required to keep this site up and running. Going on revenue ernt so far, the addition of Google Ads won't even pay for half of that cost. One thing I will promise though is that there will be no pop up, take over your screen style ads on this site while I own it. I do however ask you to please click on one of the advertisement links if you see one of interest.

The second thing is the replacement of the Visitor Stats based module I was using to display visitor information in the left hand column. The module I was using recorded and fetched visitor stats to my pphlogger database via the use of JavaScript. This proved to be very time consuming, and as a result I've replaced it with a new stats block which uses PHP to gather stats from my PHP-Stats install. The biggest downside of this is as I've migrated from pphlogger to PHP-Stats I have lost the last 6 months worth of detailed visitor data. However, I felt the advantages of PHP-Stats made this sacrifice a worthwhile one. I have also removed the Virus Information block as it also introduced a significant amount of lag time when loading the site as it had to go to the Panda site each time to collect virus information.

Finally, one of my ongoing projects has been to find a freeware product to gather and display SNMP data from all my devices in real time, or as close to real time as possible without demanding too much in the way of resources. There was always the tried and tested MRTG, however it is fairly rigid in it's reporting options as I wanted to see as close to live data as I could. The main problem I have with MRTG is that it has a minimum of 5 minute averages, meaning that highly variable resources such as CPU or bandwidth could be at 100% utilization for 3 minutes (very bad), then at 20% for the next 2 minutes and MRTG would report your 5 minute average as only 68%. While this result is technically correct, it doesn't give a true indication of resource usage.

This is where I came across RDD tool and Cacti. RRD tool is the next progression on from MRTG, and is far more flexible and resource usage friendly (a reduction of up to 20%). Cacti is a freeware PHP/MySQL package that gathers and graphs (among others) SNMP data. I found Cacti to have a fairly large learning curve, but once you start to get your head around it you begin to realize the huge potential that its very modular interface offers. Not only that, Cacti has a growing community which is very active and helpful, so expect to be seeing some results from me in the not too far distant future,