Thursday 7 Feb 2002

The alerting section of the i-scream monitoring system now makes full use of an externally developed IRC bot for it's IRC connectivity. To find out more about this IRC bot, please visit the author's website at http://www.jibble.org.

Tuesday 8 Jan 2002

Java ACL (Access Control List) code has been added to the util package of the i-scream server. This code will ultimately allow the server to be more secure when exposed to the Internet. More details can be found here on the author's website.

Tuesday 18 Dec 2001

The i-scream ihost package has undergone significant changes to make it more flexible and modular. It now incorporates plugins which can be written in any language, and automatically XML encodes data it is given (as opposed to the hardcoded approach in the old version). It has also been made more robust, and where possible optimised to reduce the load on the host system.

Details of the i-scream central monitoring system can be found on the features and overview page. A variety of screen shots from the system show some of the key features in use. The reports demo page provides a static example of what the i-scream reports (alerts, historical graphs, and live data) could look like on a production system.

The latest source code is available in the CVS repository, with binary downloads on the downloads page. The documentation page has details of installation, use and maintenance for the end user and developer. We value feedback and comments from you, so please drop us an e-mail to dev@i-scream.org.uk.

Historical/Realtime graphing package

The current system for graphing i-scream data from the i-scream system is good, but proving to be unscalable and very resource hungry. This is mostly due to the MySQL database backend, and the vast quantity of data recorded. The new system in development makes use of RRDtool to generate the graphs in realtime. This reduces the peak loads of the system, and allows generation of more flexible graphs. This work is nearing completetion.

Server security

Security was something mostly overlooked in the original stage of this project (due to the academic nature of the work). However, once in production use this has become an issue, and is being addressed. Initially the plan is to lock down the external points of access (TCP & UDP) in the server to specific hosts. In the longer term, encryption of data would be nice, but would take a lot more time and work.

Testing and Development

The i-scream system is being tested and developed within the Univeristy of Kent Computer Science department by the Systems Group. This has led to many bug fixes and minor feature enhancements, and will hopefully help to aid the long term development of the system.

The i-scream Distributed Central Monitoring System started off as a final year project for a group of Computer Science students at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. The project was completed at 4pm on 29 March 2001. It consisted of five lever-arch folders containing mostly source code and documentation. The CVS repository was tagged to signify this even, however, the project is still being developed by the core development team.

As can be seen in our "problem domain" document, the project was aimed at the UKC Computer Science department, and as such we believed that a demonstration to the "customer" was important. The feedback from our demonstation was more positive than we had anticipated. We believe that the system may now be of interest to anybody who wishes to monitor a number of machines on their network using a central configuration. The i-scream central monitoring system is now being used by the UKC Computer Science department, and their feedback is being used to further improve the product.

The name i-scream arose from a meeting whereupon one member of the development team felt a strange urge to draw an ice cream on the discussion board. It later became apparent that we had no name for our project (other than 'The Project'). It seemed only natural to name our project after the ice cream that had been oh-so-randomly drawn on the white board. Copyright issues immediately ruled out anything involving Mr Whippy, so we had to settle for i-scream. And thus, we were left with a cunning play on words - it still sounded like ice cream, yet also served as a functional description of our system - namely, one which screams at somebody if something has gone wrong...