Daily Archives: June 6, 2008

software development, web authoring

By the way, your website is down

2 Comments

Ever had that, in an email or phone call, and thought: if only I’d known earlier?

There are plenty of ways to monitor a web site’s availability, but I thought it should be simple to do a custom monitoring application in Visual Basic. Here it is, as described in the August 2008 Personal Computer World. One advantage of this approach is that you can write your own rules for what counts as available. For example, you can set the acceptable response time; or check the content of a page.

It’s very basic. For example, the alert just calls the FlashWindow API. You’d probably want to change it, maybe fire off an email or two. I may improve it over time, but no promises.

Technorati tags: , ,
virtualization

VirtualBox: get today’s update

5 Comments

If you are trying VirtualBox (which I recommend) make sure you get today’s update, version 1.6.2.

The story: I tested VirtualBox 1.5.6 which works great. I thought I should try the latest version, the first with Sun xVM branding, so downloaded it yesterday. Then I wasted an hour trying to get the networking working. With VirtualBox, the default is NAT networking with your host PC, which enables the Internet but means your virtual machine is detached from your local network. If you want it on your local network, you have to create a Virtual Host Interface and then bridge it with your real network connection. Not difficult; but version 1.6.0 broke something so that the Virtual Host Interface could not transmit data. I tinkered with various settings and drivers until I discovered this changelog for 1.6.2:

  • Networking: fixed a host interface networking regression introduced in 1.6.0

Right. Installed the update and everything is fine. The good news: VirtualBox is just as fast as before. In fact, it scored slightly higher on PassMark: 631.

I also updated Virtual PC 2007 to SP1. In my test this was fractionally slower than before, with a score of 387. Neither score is significantly different though.