Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:21:38 +0100 From: "Koster, K.J." <K.J.Koster@kpn.com> To: 'FreeBSD Hackers mailing list' <freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org> Subject: Cooperative site-sitting Message-ID: <59063B5B4D98D311BC0D0001FA7E4522026D76A2@l04.research.kpn.com>
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Dear FreeBSD Hackers,
I've been walking around with a wild idea again. I'm worried that this mail
is going to be a bit of a long rant. Sorry in advance.
I've been looking at those sites that can monitor the availability and
performance of your web site. For a few bucks per URL, you can receive a
monthly e-mail about how much your site has been visible across the 'net.
Someone wrote a HTML/cgi wrapper around ping and traceroute and is making
good money on that. Good for them of course.
The better ones will have pingservers at strategic locations on the 'net, so
they can even tell you in more detail why your site was not reachable. The
clever ones don't actually have much hardware, but pay you a few bucks if
you run their ping server daemon, that watches other sites.
Anyway, we have many bigger and smaller web admins on this mailing list.
Perhaps some of us could engage in a joint effort to watch eachother's
sites, instead of having others make money off all of us. If my site goes
down, you send me an e-mail, or a fax or a page or whatever, and if yours
goes down, I do you the same favour. No money involved.
You'd team up with three or four web masters in different time zones, so
that you have 24-hour human-assisted coverage. You exchange phone/fax/page
numbers and agree to be friends even if someone screws up. After a while,
when you're comfortable with your new-found web-pals, you may even give them
ssh access to a rebootaccount. This may save you a wakeup call to frob that
big red knob.
For bigger companies, this is a bad idea, because they are already doing
their own monitoring. *cough* Home users don't participate because they have
a life. :-)
Ideal candidates are for example schools and smaller, pressed-for-cash
companies or non-profit organisations. Companies that have a sysop for eight
hours a day, but none during off-hours. Places where webmasters come in in
the morning to discover whether their site is up or down.
Just a thought. I will go back to work now. :-)
Kees Jan
=================================================
TV is the worst of both worlds. It's not as
good at words as radio is because the pictures
are a distraction which demand attention, and
it's not as good as cinema because the pictures
are not nearly as good. [Douglas Adams]
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