Residential monitoring ideas requested

[Xander]

I'm toying with the idea of writing a program that will run on autostart. In its current brainstorming incarnation, it would scan the eventlog for disk errors and, if found, email both the customer and myself (but email me no more than once a week to limit potential floods).

What other errors might be worth scanning for and/or what other conditions might be worth a quick check?

 

[allanc]

I'm toying with the idea of writing a program that will run on autostart. In its current brainstorming incarnation, it would scan the eventlog for disk errors and, if found, email both the customer and myself (but email me no more than once a week to limit potential floods).

What other errors might be worth scanning for and/or what other conditions might be worth a quick check?

Virus scan service not starting or definitions not updating.
Firewall service not starting.
Automatic updates (if enabled) are failing.
Backup failing.

 

[Knightsman]

I personally use GFI for this, its cheap enough, that its worth it for my meet customers (less than $13ya)

Smart data
Lost of internet
Installed programs
Changed drivers

Sent from my DROID2 using Tapatalk

 

[MichaelsComputerServices]

Yea, A program to do these things would be great. Can you give some details about GFI?

 

[Xander]

Maybe the tangent of GFI could get a thread of its own.

Virus scan service not starting or definitions not updating.
Firewall service not starting.
Automatic updates (if enabled) are failing.
Backup failing.

Nice ideas, Allan. The firewall one might be tough without getting into knowing whether or not a 3rd party firewall is installed.


I found psloglist in the Sysinternals suite. It looks like it might have everything I need for the basics; just need to figure out which errors to look for in which OS.


Anybody know, once Windows has downloaded updates and is waiting to install, where it stores them? Just checking for files sitting there could be something.

 

[dbdawn]

Anybody know, once Windows has downloaded updates and is waiting to install, where it stores them? Just checking for files sitting there could be something.

%windir%\softwaredistribution\download
They are stored with the original name, i.e. f59f939149f52915b5341b5dbd8cf860d0370389

 

[Xander]

Thanks, dbdawn. I know it was lazy but I was just heading out so thought I'd ask before googling.

Looking at that folder on my system, I flushed it and went to check for updates. 3 small files got written to that folder but no Updates are available. Seems I can't simply check for a non-empty status of that folder to determine if updates are waiting to install. Perhaps, though, if the files are beyond ___KB in size...? These 3 are 15,39,25kb in size. It'd be rare for an update to be <100KB.