Tail - Software to make life easier
Continuing the series on useful software (see previous post) - Tail is a mighty little utility that makes sense of log files and brings them to life...
The flavour I've settled on is Tail for Win32 - another free open-source project, that ports the Unix tail command for Windows. There are a couple of really powerful features that make your CADmin job easier....:
Monitor log files real-time
Do you sometimes find yourself opening a log file to trace an error? Or check up on a license server? Or monitor database activity? Previously I'd open a file and have to keep re-loading to see the latest changes... but tail will automatically add new lines onscreen as they appear - and it's very fast. For example: monitoring a flexlm license file - the "OUT" message line appears a split second after a user checks out a license. Or if you re-read the license file, you see all the information appear right away. Or you can monitor a database log file (eg: Intralink - network\log\listener.log) - and see users connect to the database realtime. Great for health-checking or trouble-shooting.
Highlight keywords - and Tally them
There's a cool feature that lets you embolden particular words in different colours (eg: in a flexlm file I highlight "DENIED" "INACTIVE" "IN:" "OUT:" "shake it all about"). As well as drawing your eye to them, this will count them too... so you can check the Tally window for counts of licenses out, returned, denied, inactive. I've used this to work out license server "percentages" for each of our servers... eg: you divide the number of denied messages by the number of OUT: messages - and you have a figure that suggests how capable the server is... hopefully you have a low number here. Or, you could divide the inactive by the OUT: - and see how many of your issued licenses are abandoned by users (or by timeout value).
Tail has been a great benefit in everyday work, eg: one facility complained of losing licenses during the day... by using Tail Tally, I found a high percentage of inactive licenses, and looking into the details I realised folks were away from their machines for just long enough to get kicked out by our timeout value (20mins) - but back again soon after, having to re-acquire a license (and sometimes getting denied, depending how busy it was). They were away from the software because they often visited the shop floor, or worked CAM or other CAD packages. So my solution was to increase timeout for that particular license server, giving them 60 mins to keep licenses alive. Since them we've had no complaints...
If you use something similar, or have more tips in this vein - please let us know in the comments...
