The IT ecosystem is rich with network monitoring systems (NMS). Each NMS has different capabilities, costs, and purposes in life. It is commonplace for me to come into a business that has invested in an NMS that doesn’t fit all their needs. You might ask, “What does this have to do with creating a Windows service?” Here is the scenario that brought this up.
A client has a monitoring solution for their Windows servers and some basic network up/down stats. Their internet connection had been flaky for a month or two. As we worked with their ISP, their connection continued to stay up but latency would spike and often drop packets. The monitoring never sees the link as down but the level of service is degraded and mostly unusable. The ISP can quickly reset the ports and fix the issue, but we want to know right when this happens to minimize downtime.
One of my biggest hurdles I have come across since taking on Java is really getting my head wrapped around the OOP (object oriented programming) idea. Most of my previous experience with visual basic and php was procedural programming. Because of this, my mind is stuck thinking in those terms.
All the e-books I have been going over describe OOP as something that “should” be easy to grasp. A class is a classification of an object. An object is a noun, like a dog, that can be described attributes or fields: four legs, two ears, two eyes, brown, tail, etc. A method is how that dog interacts with other objects: playFetch(), catchFrisbee(), peeOnLeg(), etc.
The other day I was contacted by a Cpt Miller with the Connecticut Army National Guard (CTARNG). It turns out that the entire CTARNG uses the program I wrote called Active Directory UserMod Assistant. Cpt Miller needed some modifications made to make it work in his environment. I was able to help him out with his mods. It was a bit odd getting a request like that in Iraq. He didn’t know I was here but it was nice knowing that the program I wrote is helping out the Military.
I finally got around to a new release of Active Directory UserMod Assistant -> adumass.
This was a major release as it fixed some pretty serious bugs and also greatly improved the UI and back end code. I also added a few functions for data validation.
Thanks to all those that have helped and submitted support requests. The next version should have a translation pack for those users that want to help with translations.