Fun from the archives! – While going through some old backups at home i found my very first application for a mobile device.
In 2003 i released a solution that I called “NT Services”. The goal was to have an easy access tool to information about a range of servers in a LAN, from anywhere. It was created with web interfaces working for most graphical browsers (Win/*nix/Mac), PocketPC powered PDA’s, and any device that can use the Opera Software SSR (Small Screen Rendering) browser.
I had at the time just begun to use .NET and C# as my development environment, but because I wanted to get this done fast (I was going on summer vacation and needed access to hosted servers) and i had 5 years previous experience with Visual Basic, I wrote it using Visual Basic for COM objects and did web and server side code using VBScript. This also became the last thing I ever wrote using this.
After release to all of the shareware sites i could find at the time around December 2003 it took only a few days before journalist Jeff Fellinge from Windows NT Magazine (now called Windows IT Pro) ask for a review copy and in the January 2004 print issue of the magazine said that “…Inexpensive and reliable; intuitive front end; quick response time; excellent management functions.. ” and that “…NT Services’ management features are equal or superior to those of other products that cost thousands of dollars…”
I don’t know how many downloads I had all in all, but on one of the downloads sites; “Major Geek” the current download counter is just about 11000 downloads. And we sold a few thousand licenses.
The system requirements was fairly simple and needed a minimum of IIS 4.0 running on Windows NT 4 with ServicePack 6a. To use the website you can use any of the “newer” browsers you can find for download. Supported was: Opera 7.03, Netscape 7.1, Internet Explorer 6 on the PC and on devices you could use Pocket IE (PocketPC 2002) and the first version of Opera SSR (Small Screen Rendering) browser.
Through the web interface you could do most basic things with servers and had a feature list that looked like this:
Server information:
The server information view gives you detailed information about the computer. Column 1 gives you Operating system information, like OS version, service pack, and a link that probes your computer to check which hot fixes are installed, up-time and last boot time.
Column 2 shows network information, computer role, work group and details about your NIC’s. Column 3 gives you some hardware information. RAM installed, pc type, manufacturer, model and how many cpu’s are installed. You get details about the cpu(s), clock speed, socket etc. and at last you get information about your motherboard. Manufacturer, model, bios version, serial, etc (not all information is available for all computers). All this information can be exported to a text file for download. You can also reboot the computer.
IIS Sites:
The IIS Sites tool shows you a list of all web sites running on the IIS, the list shows the following for each site: Site name, Status, Execute rights, Site rights and site bindings with all host headers, ip’s and ports. To get more details about each site just click on the details link. From both the list and detailed view you can start, stop, pause and restart each site.
Services:
Services show you the status of each computer service installed on the computer. The list can be sorted in any preferred way and shows you Service description, name, status, startup option, and service type. From the list any service can be started, stopped and restarted and the startup option can be changed between manual, automatic and disabled. Click on the service description and you get more details about each service. The detailed view gives you the same options as de list view plus dependencies information and the path to the executable.
Task manager:
The task manager shows you the running processes on the computer. The list shows process ID, process name, memory used, the username of the process owner and when the process was started. Click on the process ID link to stop (kill) the running process. Page reloads at a user selected interval.
Terminal:
An unique tool that lets you remotely disconnect and reset terminal server sessions. Very useful if you have reached the limit of 2 concurrent sessions on a windows 2k server and one or both of them are “ghost” sessions that are dropped.
Event viewer:
The event viewer shows you the content of the computer event logs. At the top you see a list of the event logs on the computer, and then by default you get the last 25 entries in the application log. At the bottom you can browse the pages of the event log. Click on the event log name to switch event log.
