Inspired by an old Slashdot article and my obsessive need for shorter network outage response times, I decided this year to create a ‘Christmas lights’ frontend to our Network Management System. The results have been very encouraging. …

I recently moved from NOC operator to engineer and can no longer spend all my time staring at and refreshing network status webpages :(. As such I wanted something that could alert me to outages with little or no effort on my part. …

In a nutshell, the Thinkpad checks a remote cron-generated file every five minutes for the existence of any alarms. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel for this, I use data from our pre-existing and very capable network monitoring system to populate that file. The Thinkpad then turns on the corresponding circuit of Christmas lights based on what it found in that file - white for all clear and red for trouble.

Instructions, pictures, movies, and even a live web cam are here.

His Bash script is another good ol’ fashioned screen scraper, powered by wget. To toggle two X10 devices, he uses BottleRocket. Simple, elegant, and well worth every hand-typed character:

  #!/bin/sh

  /usr/bin/wget \
    http://censored-because-I-like-not-being-fired.edu/remotefile \
    -O /home/localfile

  CHECK=`grep 1 /home/localfile`

  if [ -n "$CHECK" ]
  then
    br A2 on
    br A1 off
  else
    br A1 on
    br A2 off
  fi

Put the script on a schedule, plug in monitoring devices of your choosing, and then consider what you’re going to do with all the time you’ll save.