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by: Bernard Teo








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Copyright © 2003-2012
Bernard Teo
Some Rights Reserved.

Sat 06 Aug 2005

WebMon 1.1.3 Released

Category : Technology/WebMon113.txt

Of the three - Postfix Enabler, DNS Enabler and WebMon - WebMon is probably the most buggy of the lot. That's because it's the first one where I'm building in remote configuration, right from the start.

I could make WebMon work in standalone mode, where you do the configuration locally on the server (for WebDAV, PHP, SSL, etc) and that would improve its stability no end.

But when it comes to monitoring the web server activity, it's really more convenient to do it remotely. Who wants to walk to the server just to see what's going on in the web server log?

So, what I've done in WebMon 1.1.3 is to add the ability to work directly on the server, while keeping the option to work remotely.

A good strategy to use with WebMon is to start working at the server. In the WebMon setup panel (accessed from either the Help or Preferences menu), you enter the server name as "localhost", first line below :

And then you turn on WebDAV, PHP or SSL. And test that all these things work, including the ability to publish iCal calendars in the WebDAV folder (which you could also use as a backup store, like .Mac's iDisk folder).

If these are OK, you could start preparing to use WebMon for what it was originally intended to do - as a Web Server Log Monitor.

You could enter a line like the second line in the screen shot above, where you call the Web Server, userName@localhost, where userName has administrative rights to the machine. The "@localhost" notation signals that, although you're working locally at the server, you will be "pretending" to connect remotely. WebMon will try to set up a remote login connection while you're still working locally at the server machine.

This is useful because you can ignore issues like network speed and timeouts, for now, while testing conceptually that your machine has been set up properly to support remote login connections through SSH. If you're using an unmodified, garden-variety OS X machine, you should have no problems getting this set up through WebMon. But some systems have custom modifications that WebMon can't find its way around.

If Step 2 is OK, you can now run WebMon from another machine and get it to connect to your server, using the userName@domainName notation, like in line 3 in the screen shot above. If you get to Step 3, and you can find a reasonably fast connection to your server over the network, you should be able to monitor the server's log file and change your server's configuration, all from a remote machine. And the whole idea with WebMon is that you can monitor and configure any number of server machines from this single control machine.

If Step 3 doesn't work, because of connection issues, etc., at least WebMon would have been useful in Step 1, where you limit yourself to doing things locally on the server machine. I hope WebMon works for more people now.

Posted at 4:21PM UTC | permalink

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WebMon for Mavericks

Luca for Mavericks

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Services running on this server, a Mac Mini running Mac OS X 10.9.2 Mavericks:

  • Apache 2 Web Server
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  • Dovecot IMAP Server
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  • WebDAV Server
  • VPN Server
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all set up using MailServe, WebMon, DNS Enabler, DNS Agent, VPN Enabler, Liya and our SQL installers, all on Mavericks.