Innovative Software Development



Products & Services

SAMonitor

If you rely on your network and service providers for your Internet and critical communication needs. If something goes wrong in your network, you must know it as soon as possable, fix the problem quickly and get you network, servers and services up and running smoothly again!


With a small investment in SAM Monitor, you can rest assured that your network and services are monitored 24 hours a day 7 days a week and so if anything goes wrong? you will quickly in order to take actions!


SAMonitor is a network management tool that continuously monitors network devices and services availability both locally or remotely. In the event of network or application errors, SAMonitor can alert the you by email, phone or pager as soon as problems develop.


A comprehensive change log file will record every event of the monitored devices and services for your review anytime at your convenience, or for you to make a graphic report to pass to others. You can also configure SAMonitor so that when something goes wrong, a set of actions, such as executing a program, rebooting a server or update a web page, will be triggered, which will help you address the problem immediately.


SAM is a simple availability monitor that runs on Solaris, LINUX and Windows. SAM is a server process monitoring the availability of any number of machines on the network. As the state of any of these monitored machines changes SAM records and raises an to alert that the state of a machine has changed.


The machines to be monitored are put into a list SAM then uses this as a working set of machines to monitor. At defined periods the monitor sends a ping to each of the machines in the list as to ascertain the current availability of that machine.


In order to make sure the availability monitor is always available? a backup SAM can be run. Normally the main server will monitor the machines in the network, however is this machine is made unavailable a backup with automatically take over.


This is achieved by having the backup only monitoring the master SAM. If the backup finds the master "down" then it will start monitoring to network machines. Then the master is back "up" the back up SAM will stop monitoring. The reason for not running them both is it keeps the network traffic down as running two will just duplicate the same results is if one was running.


The State table File. The State table is a snap-shot of all the machines status at the current time. Each time the state of a machine changes this file is generated. If a server stops for any reason this file then contains the state of the machines just before the server stopped. If the master server goes 'down' the Backup Server must maintain the same state of all the machines being monitored, this file contains that information. Therefore this information must be sent to the backup each time a change is made. If the backup servers is called upon to take over then this file is used to initialise the server.


ImgArchive

Up to only a few years ago storing digital pictures was an activity only a minority of people participated. Image files and over time this can grow quite large. Soon too large to contain in a single folder and soon after it will be increasingly difficult to find images especially when all the image name are similar. With the wide spread use of digital camera's more and more people are storing pictures on there computers in some sort of archive.  And that's where ImgArchive comes into play.


ImgArchive is a image achiving system. Imgarchive unlike a number of image storage products stores image files into a central repository.


The repository is much like an ordinary file server, except that it remembers every change ever made to your images, the information about those image and the links that bind them. This allows you to recover older versions of your images, or examine the history of how your images changed. In this regard, many people think of a archive system as a sort of “time machine”. It stores your image files in a form of time line. ImgArchive allows you to tag image much like a directory system. For example if I had a photo of a famly member then the tag may be /people/famly/sister. She may be on holiday in the lake district so you can also create a tag like /holidays/2002 and another may be say /landscape/lake district.


All of these tags enable you to search and index your photos using different search paths.

ImgArchive can access its repository across networks, which allows it to be used by people on different computers. At some level, the ability for various people to modify and manage the same set of images from their respective locations fosters collaboration. And because the work is versioned, you need not fear of losing control if some incorrect change is made to an image, just undo that change.


Imgarchive runs on Solaris, LINUX and Windows.


FtpCOPY

FtpCOPY is a tool to make a remote FTP server into a backup device. Simply drop or copy files into Windows FtpCOPY and FtpCOPY will back up the files to the remote FTP Server.

As the FTP server can be situated anywhere in the world FtpCOPY can provide a backup system that safe guards your data against any local catastrophe such as fire or theft of local systems.

FtpCOPY integrates seamlessly into Windows explorer's right click" menu. Just select the files and directores you need to copy within windows explorer, then clicking right key on the mouse, FtpCOPY presents its self as an item in the right menu option. Select FtpCopy in the menu and all the selected file will pass to FtpCOPY. It's as simple as that. All the selected items will be queued to be send to the FTP server in the background in a simuler way to send files to be printed by a printer.

FtpCOPY also provides a large number of options:

  1. FtpCOPY will allow you to filter out files that need not be copied. This can be on:
    1. Modification Date. This can be specified in a number of ways:
      1. Within the last number of days.
      2. Within the last number of months.
      3. Within Specified dates.
    2. Size.
  1. Can Compress files to save space on the server.
  2. Can encypt file to stop prying eyes seeing your documents and any other private things.
  3. keeps a record of each file uploaded by process of finger printing the file. This allow you to set a filter to uploading stop any that the contents have not changed.
  4. FtpCOPY can Verify that files sent to the server have been sent without corruption.

FtpCOPY also provides a command line interface which will allow third party schedulers to run scheduled backups.

A standard FTP server can be used as the remote FTP server. This enables FTP servers belonging to ISP's to be used. Most free WEB space is accessed using FTP thus ideal for off-site backup (provided files are encrypted which FtpCOPY supports). The directory system is preserved on remote backup device as they are on the local machine. As FTP may be over a show connection the files dropped into FtpCOPY are cached in a temporary directory this then is used to allow the backup operation to queue files to be copied to server at an appropriate time.

In addition if the FTP Server is offline FtpCOPY will try to connect to the Ftp Server by looking for it after a time delay (pinging). Once reconnected the files are transferred normally. This is very useful in the case were the machine being backed up is a laptop which is not always connected to the FTP backup server.

As you may not control the FTP server and may also have no control over the security of the server, FtpCOPY allows you to encrypt the contents of your backups using a encrypt method called Blowfish. This is a strong encrypt method which is difficult to crack. In addition FtpCOPY can also compress your files to conserve space on the server.



TruckTRACK

Trucking operators have a diverse requirement then it comes to the provision of a tracking system. This may be as simple as a historical system, or a mid-range near real-time system using GSM with history going to a fully state-of-art real-time system using GPRS with history and timed dynamic route following with all the options. TruckTRACK is designed to be moduler in order to flexible as possible to meet the needs of todays fleet operations tayloring the system to meet the operater's requirement.

To understand the systems on offer we need to understand what the different systems do and how thay might fit into you're operation. ln order to do this we split the systems into technology types.


The Truck Trak product is designed to be moduler to allow it to be tailered to the customers needs and be intergrated into pre-existing systems. For this to be achieved, there must be a product containing all the necessary functionaly in the from of a framework in which to from the customised system. This document describes that framework and the components within it. The product is called TruckTrak which is targeted to Van and Truck management.

All Vehicle management systems contain some essential components in order to carryout essential functions within the system. The first part of the document will deal with the these essentials. However some operators may not wish to implent a complete system and not see some of the essentials as that, other's may think that other fuctions within the system as essential. But anyway this can be used as a starting point.


The TTU

All systems need an on-board computer. In the TruckTrak system it is known as the Truck Tracking Unit (TTU). This processes information from all the devices attached to it. The essential ones are the GPS unit, the GMS/GPRS unit and or some unit to retreve trip information.

The GPS unit. This is essential in that it locates where on the globe the vehicle is. GMS/GPRS unit. Some method of transfering information to and form the vehicle in real-time or almost real-time can be essential. The can be used to send messages to the driver informing of trip or drop-off changes, emergences, such as drive atack, unauthorized door openings etc. However this is normally restricted for short messages as the cost-per-byte is very high compared to wireless LAN or direct conection to the TTU.

These four components are the core of the On-Board Unit. But in order to utilitise these components the TTU needs software that combines these units into a single unit that provides the function that the management system requires. This must be seen as the fith essential component that the On-Board unit requires in order to function as a system.