Omnivex Corporation
www.omnivex.com
REALTIME VIDEO CONTROL AND TEMPERATURE MONITOR/SHUTDOWN SYSTEM UNDER UNIX
"Behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) we have two SGI ONYX2 multi-pipe supercomputers, used to deliver realtime movies to our Planetarium and to develop content. Other SGI ONYX2s deliver High Definition video to Sony monitors through-out the building. We use Sensorsoft SCOM on IRIX for computer control of these Sony monitors. We also use SCOM along with the Sensorsoft Soft Thermometer to monitor the temperature of our supercomputers to prevent possible overheating. In the event of a temperature alarm, administrators such as myself are notified by e-mail and pager. Failing corrective action by us, an SCOM based script can automate a complete shutdown of the supercomputer using a Sensorsoft Soft Relay device."
Chris MacKarrell
System Administrator
American Museum of Natural History
New York, NY
WEATHER ALERT SYSTEM ON A SUN SPARC
"Here at the State of Hawaii Civil Defense I use the scom program to capture message feeds from the National Weather Service. Data is transmitted in ASCII format on two dedicated modem lines. The host machine running the scom program is a Sun Sparc20 with A/B serial ports. Text is appended to a daily log file. I wrote some PERL scripts to extract individual messages and produce near real-time updates to our Web server. The messages contain important weather information such as forecasts, alerts and warnings."
Juliana Lo
Pacific Disaster Center
ALPHANUMERIC PAGING SYSTEM UNDER UNIX
"The SCOM software is a well packaged product which installs its own man page in the man pages directory. The product has proven to be reliable and easy to use. In our application, a shell script uses SCOM to transmit a variety of messages to alpha pagers to alert our systems people about changes or failures in our computer systems. We are very satisfied with the product."
John Horn
VanTran of Tucson Inc.
Tucson, AZ
VIDEO ROUTER SYSTEM ON A SUN SPARCSTATION
"SCOM is a cool program that makes it a breeze to talk with serial devices from Shell Scripts or Perl. We're using it at KPIX to control our video routing switcher and as the communications module of a gateway program that moves news stories from the newsroom computer system to our web server.
The only thing I didn't like about it was how long it took me to discover it! I would have saved so much time if I found it months earlier!"
Rusty Hodge
Hodge Interactive Productions
San Francisco, CA
CD-ROM JUKEBOX INTERFACES TO UNIX MACHINE
"SCOM has allowed us to implement a serial communications link between our Unix machine and a DOS-Based CD-ROM application. CD-ROM information requests are sent VIA the serial port to the DOS CD-ROM server, where the information is obtained from the CD-ROM and sent back through the serial port. All this is acheived in one invocation of SCOM from the shell prompt. This has allowed us to use our DOS-based CD-ROM application on our Unix machines by writing simple Unix shell scripts, as opposed to complicated C programs.
We also plan to use SCOM to upload programs into our handheld data collection terminals, and to download the data that has been gathered during our physical inventories at our stores.
When we first evaluated the initial version of SCOM, it was lacking some features that we would have liked to see. Vendor was quick to respond to our requests and added the features we requested to their next version of the product. SCOM's low price and vendor's willingness to accomodate our needs made the product well worth the investment."
Steve Wertz
Computer Literacy Bookshops, Inc.
San Jose, CA
MODEM CONFIGURATION FOR SATELLITE SYSTEM
"We've finished installing a Vsat system in some 600 stores all across Canada, the installers have as one of their tasks to configure a modem. We used SCOM in a batch file to configure and test the AT soft settings.
We've had no problems getting a consistently configured modem without the requirement to train the Vsat installers as communications technicians. Vendor cooperated quickly as we set up the project and SCOM has subsequently proven itself as a reliable product".
Ian Howard
Shoppers Drug Mart/Pharmaprix
Toronto, Canada
SERVER ROOM TEMPERATURE MONITOR ON SUN SPARCSTATION
"We use Soft Thermometer's and SCOM software to monitor and control the environmental settings in two of our central server rooms. Power-peaks are quite common in our part of town and at least one of our air conditioners often misbehaves and switches off for safety/security reasons. After the power stabilizes it doesn't switch back on again. Therefore we need 24 hour monitoring of the temperature in our server rooms. Whenever the temperature exceeds a given limit, bells and whistles! go off sending alphanumeric page messages and email to the operator. SCOM's pre-configured scripts and INI-files did a great job for our task in adapting the whole software suite for our needs. All in all, we are very satisfied with the ease of use and the multi-purpose concept of the SCOM software."
Hans Schaechl
Max-Planck-Inst. f. Mathematik, Computing Center
Bonn, Germany
CONSULTANT DEVELOPS WEB BASED TEMPERATURE MONITOR FOR CUSTOMER
"Due to a problem in the air conditioning of our customer, the temperature of the computer room sometimes rises to unacceptable levels. A few weeks ago, this happened again and the temperature reached 42 C in the computer room and over 60 C inside the computers. There was an alarm sent out to a monitoring company, but they completely missed it. It took four System Admins a good part of the night to get the system working again. We decided to install the Soft Thermometer and SCOM software, because it attaches to UNIX systems. This made it easier to integrate with the customer's own warning/paging system and our PerfGraph product, Sysman's web-based graphical performance monitor, which also runs at this customer site. Staff can now login from home and see live temperature readings. They don't have to drive to the office if they suspect a problem. Also, we get advanced warnings on our GSM telephones. People from the U.S. can now also monitor our computer room through their intranet connection. Overheating is not going to happen anymore. Installing SCOM and the Soft Thermometer and integrating it into PerfGraph took less than an hour."
Sysman's customer is a large U.S. company with offices and datacentres in Oklahoma, Amsterdam, Singapore and Thailand, running Sysman's PerfGraph software for Unix and Oracle performance measurements.
Niels de Troye
Sysman Automatisering B.V., System and Network Management Consultants
Amstelveen, Holland
http://www.sysman.nl
