MONITOR REMOTE SERVER STATUS

Are you a Windows NT shop that uses Timbucktu or Symantec PCAnywhere 8.0

to remotely control servers in out-of-state sites? If so, it's often difficult to know

what the remote server's status is while rebooting a machine because the

connection with the PCAnywhere service is one of the first to get dropped.

To work around this, create a simple, one-line shell script that you can

keep in your administrative desktop folder that lets you see when the server

comes back up:

ping -t x.x.x.x (where x.x.x.x is the IP address of the server)

The -t option causes the ping to run continuously until you interrupt it by

pressing CTRL-C. You can literally watch the server's network connection go

down and eventually restart. Usually after the system restarts, you can wait

for a screenful of echoes and the PCAnywhere service will have had time to

restart, if so configured.