Saturday 1 June 2002

Work has now been finished on a new ihost written in C. This has been in the pipeline for a long time, and we're glad to see an efficient host at last! Credit goes to our new developer Pete. Until we update the downloads pages you can download the new ihost here.

Tuesday 21 May 2002

We've finally put the finishing touches to the new RRDtool based graphing system. It's working well, and has done away with the MySQL database backend which took up far too many resources. This new system generates the graphs in a more realtime nature, allowing more flexible graphs to be generated. This is currently only available through .

Saturday 18 May 2002

The i-scream central monitoring system is now licensed under the GNU Public License. We are currently working to make full downloads, including source, available on this site.

Thursday 7 Feb 2002

The alerting section of the i-scream central 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.

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.

Extending monitoring facilites

Work is continuing, in conjunction with the new ihost, to extend the range of i-scream's monitoring. Currently we are adding new features to more accurately monitoring memory and swap usage, along with more disk statistics. We are also planning to improve the rather basic service monitors which are currently in place.

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...