AlwaysUp
A half year ago I was working on a small project, which among other things incorporated managing a set of never stable Windows video servers. That means, we had to reboot them a couple of times a day during production hours. Because the production season spanned several months, it was out of the question to start investigating more thoroughly. So just VPN in, find the Start menu and hit Reboot - sound like a high techie thing to do…
I started to investigate some software, to do the job, with the bi-condition it shouldn’t be expensive. After some googling and trials, I found a great software called AlwaysUp.
It did the job without getting in the way of other things to do and it had a web services API. The latter was the key to a quick Grails & Groovy web app, that could supervise all of the servers, at the time we had six of them.
With a click on a button it was now possible to check the up status and reboot all (or a subset) of the video servers. Creating a web app using Grails and coding in Groovy is just a pleasure, I got the first prototype up and running during an afternoon. Some other post will address these two technologies.
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Jens Riboe
