“James Sentman announces the release of Whistle Blower 3.0 for Mac OS X”
Richmond, VA – April 3rd, 2002. James Sentman today released the 3.0
version of Whistle Blower, an enterprise server monitoring and restart
utility. This is the first version of Whistle Blower to run natively under
Mac OS X. Classic Mac OS and even 68k versions of the program are also
available.
Whistle Blower 3.0 is a significant upgrade from the previous release. In
addition to the native OS X build, it adds many new features. The FileMaker
client/server check can now verify the list of shared databases and make
sure that all your databases are still being shared. The DNS server task
can now run a query against a specific server and validate that the correct
IP address is being returned. 3.0 also adds the ability to verify the
return from SSL web servers. The MasterSwitch support has been extended to
include the MasterSwitch Plus and vertical mount units from APC and the
PowerKey support works with Sophisticated Circuits new USB PowerKey models
on classic and Mac OS X. Your server tasks can be organized into groups
with their own reporting and administration controls. This allows you to
create and manage many more tasks that previous versions. Depending on your
hardware Whistle Blower may be able to check as many as a thousand
different web servers. There is no limit set by the software, only a
practical limit set by your hardware. Version 3.0 also adds full
AppleScript support.
Whistle Blower supports direct connections and verifications of 24
different server types, including: ASIP File Sharing and Printer Sharing,
DNS, FileMaker, FirstClass, 4D, FTP, Hotline, IMAP, LDAP, POP3, QuickTime
Streaming, Radius Authentication Servers, SMTP, Telnet, Web and Secure Web
Servers, as well as generic TCP streams and sending standard pings.
The shift notification features allow you to send the page to the person
who is actually on duty that weekend, while ignoring scheduled downtime.
The web site and secure web site tasks can send form variables to CGI
scripts to validate that online systems are not only returning pages, but
that they are returning proper data and not error messages. Task
dependances will keep you from paging the web server support staff when
it’s really the router that is down and the web based administration will
let you check on, test and restart your servers from anywhere. Responses to
outages can be proportional to how long the server has been unavailable,
first trying to email you, then sending a page and if the server is still
down perform the restart automatically with a connected PowerKey or
MasterSwitch. Whistle Blower can alert you via email, or via any number of
third party paging software packages. It can also launch an AppleScript in
response to an outage allowing you to use virtually any paging or alert
system.
Whistle Blower is available for a limited time at the 2.0 version price of
$90 USD. A “lite” version limiting you to 10 servers is available for $49
USD. This is a free upgrade for all registered users of any previous
version. The program has a 45 day time out to give busy network
administrators plenty of time to get familiar with it and can be downloaded
today from:
http://whistleblower.sentman.com/
Thank you,
James Sentman