Have a little too much free time on your hands? Well, instead of playing Quake , you could try out some of the following things that you can do with NetSaint...
Create a virtual network assistant that speaks! |
The Lowdown
By utilizing event handlers and some speech software, you can have NetSaint talk to you and tell you whats wrong with your network.
Completely Scientific Ratings
Funness Rating: | 100% |
Ability To Impress Co-Workers Rating: | 100% |
Usefulness Rating: | 30% |
Wise Use Of System Resources Rating: | 5% |
The Upsides
The Downsides
Give Me Details!
First off, you need speech software installed on your system. I would recommend using the Festival Speech Synthesis System developed by The Centre for Speech Technology Research at the University of Edinburgh. This package provides the basic framework needed for converting text into spoken word. In order to use Featival in a practical manner you'll also need to install speechd. The speechd software implements /dev/speech and will queue all text written to it for processing by the Festival sound system. Once you've installed the speech software and tested it to make sure it works properly, you can move on to the next step...
In order to make NetSaint report system status via the speech software you'll have to write some event handlers. If you want audio alerts for only certain hosts or services, you'll have to define event handlers in the appropriate host and service definitions. If you want audio alerts for everything, you can just use the global_host_event_handler and global_service_event_handler definitions in the main configuration file. I've chosen to use global event handlers to make things easier to implement.
The global event handler definitions in my main configuration file look like this...
global_host_event_handler=global-hst-event-handler
global_service_event_handler=global-svc-event-handler
The command definitions for my global event handlers look like this...
command[global-hst-event-handler]=/usr/local/netsaint/libexec/eventhandlers/hst_event_handler $HOST
NAME$ "$HOSTALIAS$" $HOSTSTATE$ $STATETYPE$ $HOSTATTEMPT$
command[global-svc-event-handler]=/usr/local/netsaint/libexec/eventhandlers/svc_event_handler $HOSTNAME$ "$HOSTALIAS$"
"$SERVICEDESC$" $SERVICESTATE$ $STATETYPE$ $SERVICEATTEMPT$
So what do the event handler scripts look like? The event handlers I use are listed below. A copy of these scripts is available in the eventhandlers/ subdirectory of the distribution. You may have to modify things to work on your system...
Global Host Event Handler (hst_event_handler)
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Global Service Event Handler (svc_event_handler)
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That's it! Fire up NetSaint and listen to it tell you about your problems...