Hi Guys,
thanks to the advice and directions of the Linux forum I have completed my app ( except for making the web site look pretty )
I would like it very much if some of you could test my app on your linux machines. It is quite complicated so I really appreciate the time and effort taken. I will value any comments accordingly.
the app itself is a drone which communicates with our servers, the server tells it what to do and it reports back to our server. It should not need any configuration of firewalls, all the communication is from the drone to our servers (outbound) .
The whole app / program / site is designed to monitor servers and the apps or services running on the servers.
For example, is your Apache, ftp, pop, smtp, XOJO app all running and if it isn’t running it will fix it for you and / or notify you. Sort of like pingdom but it will actually re-run your service or program.
I will make this as detailed as humanly possible and I would like to say please don’t comment on the welcome page or sign up page of the site as I haven’t done any of that yet.
I will assume you are doing this just on your computer not on a real server. I just want to see if it works as easily as possible for us all.
Here is the link
on the page click on “Create a test account”
Rather than typing a company name can you use your forum name and follow it with XOJO I.e. Damon XOJO
You will need to create a username and password , anything is fine as long as they are 6 or more characters each. Once again maybe your name with XOJO for both i.e. JimXOJO.
The email isn’t important but the system will send you a copy of the username and password if you fill it in.
Click on Create Account and click OK at the popup.
This will take you back to the welcome page with your details filled in , just click the log in button.
The screens get better now.
There is a tab in the top left side of the screen ( I will call it the “tab” from now on ), click it and click on the second icon from the top ( the drone icon )
On the new screen click on the + sign or where it says “add a new drone”
In the list click where it says “new drone” and fill in the information at the bottom.
the name of the drone can be anything but maybe just use your name and drone I.e. jims drone
The “linux user password” is the password of the user logged into the linux machine. We will need this to test the running and closing later on.
COPY the text in the “drone key” field as we will use this in a minute.
Click on UPDATE
Click on “download the drone package LINUX”
Save it somewhere and open the ZIP file once downloaded.
Copy the folder to your desktop
open the folder and open “DroneKey.txt” with a text editor
delete what is in there and paste the key for this drone, save and quit the text editor.
Now we want to run the drone which seems to follow two options.
In MINT you double left click on “WMS drone” then click on “Change to executable and run” then double left click on “WMS drone” again to get it to run.
In UBUNTU you go to the properties of “WMS drone” and under permissions tick “Allow execution file as a program”, click close and then double left click on “WMS drone”
I am sure you are all way more familiar with this than me.
OK, all things being good the drone should run and connect to our servers, if it has it will be telling you its name “I am Jims drone”
If you get that message I am pretty happy as the rest should go well.
back on the web site click on TAB then click on the top icon ( the home icon )
You should notice your drone in the list at the bottom of the window. 
TAB / click on the top icon ( add a server application )
On the new screen click on the + sign or where it says “add a program to watch”
In the list click where it says “new server” and fill in the information at the bottom.
Change the TYPE to “Application running”
The name can be any name but lets try Jims TEST ( lets not all use the name JIM ? )
in the process name type in “gedit” ( I assume gedit comes standard on all version of Linux, it seems to for mine anyway)
Tick or cross “link to drone” and select your drone name from the list.
Click on UPDATE.
TAB / Home
now you will have your task in the main list as well. Within 5 minutes the green should turn to yellow to tell us that gedit is not running on the machine the drone is on. Please ensure you don’t have gedit running on your machine. You should also get a line in the errors section (up the top) telling you this application is at warning level 1 ( yellow ). FYI, it then goes orange , light red and finally dark red.
If you don’t get it after 6 minutes then something is wrong but within 5 minutes I expect you to have the error.
Now if you can run gedit.
Within 5 minutes the screen should change back to green for that task.
Some of you might have noticed the screen changed to a larger view, it does this automatically to show more lines on the screen. If there are more than 20 lines it will actually have the display to a grid so 40 or so applications or services can be viewed at one time. Designed for a big screen stuck on the wall of someone who want to monitor all of there sites/apps/services. Well I do anyway.
So all being good we have now shown the system can see when you have an app running and when you don’t, now we need it to do something about it.
In gedit type this in “This is temp.txt which was not running before”, save it as “temp.txt” on your desktop and leave gedit running.
back on the website click on TAB and home then on TAB / the top icon ( add a server application)
Click on your line in the list and select 1 from the “at warning level” drop down ( bottom right corner of the screen ).
select “run script” as the action
down the bottom just to the right of “Paste Level” is a drop down list, select “Kill process” and type in gedit ( just to the right of the drop down list ) then click on the “Add” button. This will add this task to the list.
Select “request process close” from the drop down and type in gedit then click on the “Add” button.
Neither of these are required really however I just want to ensure there isn’t an error on as much as possible.
Lastly, please select “run” from the list and type in “/home/damon/desktop/temp.txt” NOTE : you will have to put the path for your machine to the “temp.txt” we created before.
Click on “save level” and click on “update”
tab / home
That’s it, when you close gedit you should see that the system has launched “temp.txt” within 5 minutes, cross your fingers.
I am very interested if it worked as I explained or if you had to do something to make it work for you. The more information I can get the better I will understand Linux and the variations between the installations. I know there is a linux server which has no GUI at all, if anyone can recommended how I might get the drone running on this it would be great.
Is this how you install an app in Linux or is there a more preferred way?
I haven’t tried Debian at all.
Play with it as much as you want , click anywhere, send yourself email warnings ( looks terrible I know - on my todo list) you cant break it as it is monitoring itself so if it does crash it will be back up in 5 minutes. Currently there are 3 servers the drones can communicate with, 2 here in Australia and another running on Amazon EC2 USA.
Have fun.
PS - Is this a good idea? I need it as I run some 20 applications and services in my business and spend most of my life in a cold sweat about the state of my system. The original version has run my system for 10 years but was all hard coded into my apps so they connected to each other BUT only locally. I now have 5 drones on 5 machine they are in the office, at home and even one at a clients which I can monitor from the one site.
PPS I nearly gave up on Linux until my first post on this forum, the response pushed me to complete it, also you are the first to use it besides me.
PPPS - It is actually deigned for an iPAD / tablet so I can see the state of my system while on the road. I have done a cut down version for the iPhone or Android phone as well.
If you have got this far , many many thanks for just reading it.