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The company i'm doing contract work is using Windows NT servers for a handful of legacy clients / website hosting. Brilliant.

Anyway, One these Windows NT servers, occasionally the "World Wide Web Publishing Service" will crash, and there's really nothing we can do about it, per it being crappy old software that required IIS 4.0 and Netscape Application Server 4 for clients who refuse to upgrade.

Basically what the software does, is it checks a address, makes sure it loads, and then makes sure it matches a certain "string", to verify the contents of the page contain what their expected to contain.

If it fails the content check, or fails to load entirely, It will reboot the WWWPublishing Service, and send an email to the admins.

Several years ago the company who wrote this software closed its doors, and in doing so, their SMTP servers. So now this software cannot send emails, not an issue because I trust Nagios more anyway. What's concerning is it also has a tendency to crash or be inaccurate if a website is down (almost like its viewing a cached version instead of the live site.) I'd also like it to be a service so I can reboot the server and have the watchdog start on boot instead of having to launch the program, and hit "start" every time. (This is actually just me being lazy and wanting a "chkconfig Watchdog on" command.... :/)

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Above is a screenshot of the software just viewing google.com for an example.

Anyone know of any replacement software that works in Windows NT sp6a?

2 Answers 2

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I'd think you could cobble a script together with wget, the Windows find command, sc to control the remote service (or a "kill" utility like pskill if the remote service is hanging), and the Non-Sucking Service Manager to run the thing as a service. A batch file would probably be enough.

(I'd probably get fancy and to the HTTP in VBScript with the Msxml2.XMLHTTP object in lieu of wget, and regexp matching in the output...)

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Nice antiques there. You may be better served by putting fake entries in the hosts file for the missing SMTP servers. That just might let the software deliver emails. It's worth a shot, and can be done pretty fast.

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  • Yea, the email side i really couldn't care about, as i have nagios monitoring their entire network, so i know when things happen. I'm more interested in alternative software in terms of auto-starting (so if i reboot the server i dont have to manually login and start the watchdog every time) and something more reliable, as "Web Server Watchdog" as caching issues frequently.
    – grufftech
    Dec 28, 2009 at 22:37

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