EtherEye Network Host Checker 1.5.3 review
DownloadEtherEye is a web-based network host checking system written in PHP and standards compliant HTML. You simply provide it with a lis
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EtherEye is a web-based network host checking system written in PHP and standards compliant HTML.
You simply provide it with a list of IP addresses or domain names via the configuration interface and it will ping them on request and output the results as HTML.
You can also access the results via RSS feed for easier monitoring or to integrate into a website.
Installation:
To configure EtherEye, simply point your browser at the config.php file included with EtherEye. If it doesn't work or you get an error, PHP probably isn't properly configured on your server.
Language
Select your desired language here. This setting affects the language of the configuration interface as well as the results interface. Please read the README for instructions on how to translate EtherEye into your language if your language is not available.
Does the server run Windows?
If the server runs Windows, select "Yes", otherwise leave it on "No". If you set this to 'Yes', a few options will be filled in automatically, so you don't need to worry about them.
Which theme would you like to use?
Pretty self-explanatory really. The EtherEye interface will look different depending on which theme you select. Please see the README for instructions on how to write EtherEye themes.
Automatic refresh
If you enable automatic refreshing, the results page will be automatically re-loaded as frequently as specified by the option further down the page.
Ping command line option to specify the number of requests to send
If you selected the Windows server option you don't need to worry about this - it has been auto-filled. If not, the default should be OK for people running Linux. People running other UNIXes will need to check their ping man page.
Ping command line option to specify the ping timeout
The default value should be OK for everyone running Windows or Linux. Again, people running other UNIXes will need to check their ping man page.
Ping time-out
This value tells ping how long to wait for a response to ping requests. This value is in seconds if your server runs Linux or UNIX and milliseconds if your server runs Windows. The default value used by ping under Linux and UNIX is 3 seconds, Windows ping is 4000 milliseconds (4 seconds).
The lower this value, the less time EtherEye has to wait for ping to give up waiting for a response from a down machine, which makes the results get displayed quicker. However, bear in mind that if a machine is up but takes longer to respond than the time allowed by this value, EtherEye will report it as down! One second is probably a reasonable value for this setting.
Site name
This is simply a name used in a few places in the interface. It can be anything you want.
How often to refresh
If you enabled automatic refreshing above, you need to set this to how often you would like the results page to be automatically refreshed in seconds. The default, 300 seconds, is 5 minutes. If you didn't enable automatic refreshing above, you don't need to worry about this option.
How long to cache results for?
Each time EtherEye pings the hosts it saves the state of each host in the hosts file. This option determines how long these saved states are used for before EtherEye re-pings the hosts. If EtherEye has cached results available which have not expired, it will display them immediately without re-checking the hosts. This can be useful if you access EtherEye a lot (many times a minute) and don't need EtherEye to check the hosts that frequently. Most people will probably want to set this to 0 to disable caching completely.
Number of machines you want to watch
You need to specify here how many machines you want EtherEye to monitor. This is used to decide how many input boxes to give you on the next page.
If all is well, click on the button to save the options you've entered and move to the next page of the installation. If EtherEye is giving an error and not displaying the button, you need to check the permissions on the directory EtherEye is running from - you need to enable write access for all users (you can change it back later).
Entering the hosts
On this page, you need to enter the hosts you wish to monitor. Enter the IP address or domain name in the first box of each line, then a name for the machine in the second box (this can be anything you want) and finally select the machine type - this won't affect how EtherEye works, it is simply used to select an icon to display for the machine in the results.
Finishing the configuration
Once you have completed the installation, you may wish to change the permissions on the directory EtherEye is installed into so that every user cannot write to it (you can't be too careful).
Next, you may wish to change the permissions on the hosts-list.xml and ethereye-conf.xml files to ensure they are not writable (you don't want other people playing with your configuration). However, note that if you make hosts-list.xml non-writable, caching will not work (if you enabled it) and no error will be given to tell you this.
You may also wish to delete config.php for proper security, but then you won't be able to reconfigure EtherEye using the interface later.
Using EtherEye
Once you have EtherEye configured, you can check the machines you have configured EtherEye with by accessing the index.php file. If you use an RSS aggregator, you may wish to add rss.php to it to keep track of your network status. You could also integrate your EtherEye scan results into your website using the rss.php feed.
What's New in This Release:
This release incorporates fixes for users receiving outdated results due to caching in the browser or server and for some configuration values not being remembered when reconfiguring using the configuration interface.
EtherEye Network Host Checker 1.5.3 keywords