NightWatch Release Notes ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.13 April 5, 2021 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem in the license key generation system that caused keys to be rejected. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.12 February 22, 2021 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem that prevented running as a service under Windows 10 2004 and later. Fixed a problem in Web Status that prevented correct updating of the Activity Log display, particularly after a clear of the log. Fixed bug that prevented creating new MOs on the right-click context menu for MOs appearing in the left hand tree view display. Fixed bug in Snmp Trap processing. Queue traps would continue to be processed after scaning has ended. Fixed bug in Disk Space MO that would not allow volume monitoring to be turned off if the volume changed to Not Shared state after monitoring was enabled. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.11 July 10, 2019 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several minor bugs in WebPage MO. Fixed several bugs in Web Status displays. Fixed several bugs in Tapi based telephone notifications. Fixed identification of Windows 2014 or 2015 to correctly display 2016. Updated to support Windows Server 2019. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.10 February 1, 2018 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug that caused licensing error 5 to appear on first restart after an initial (clean) install. Fixed a bug in TAPI voice call notifications. An invalid phone number could result in a modem hang when calling through a PBX. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.9 September 1, 2016 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed some problems with Skype notifications. Due to changes in Skype by both Skype and later Microsoft, Skype notifications may no longer work on Windows XP depending on Skype version. Skype on later Windows versions seems to still work though there may be problems with some versions of Skype. Note that Skype notifications will NOT work with Skype 7.3 or Skype for Business 2015. Microsoft no longer supports the 3rd party API for Skype and so use of Skype to send messages or make phone calls may not be reliable or may stop working depending on Skype version. Fixed some minor problems with TAPI notifications via phone calls. The big news here is that the Conexant modem chip set stopped working with Vista and later. This is due to bugs in Windows components used by the modem drivers that cause the wav files (voice) sent over a phone call to actually not be played. The TrendNet TFMU-561U we have reccomended uses a Conexant chip set and so does not work on Vista and later. We have tested the US Robotics 5637 with firmware v1.2.23 or later and it does work with Vista and later with the exception of Windows 10. Again due to Microsoft changing its driver package, no voice modem works on Windows 10 at this time. To be clear, modems do work on W10 and the Conexant modems work on Vista and later but the support for recording calls and sending computer generated voice messages (wav files) does not. Our notification by phone call feature is based on recording and sending wav files over the phone call. Fixed a bug in Main form save of form size and location. If the Main form was in either the maximized or minimized state when the program ended, then the max or min form size was saved. Upon restart the main form would be maximized and not resizable or minimized and unable to be displayed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.8 March 30, 2016 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified to detect missing .Net Framework 3.5 and clearly notify the user of the problem instead of displaying a cryptic run time error. The .Net Framework 3.5 is included in older releases of Windows and must be manually installed by the user on newer releases. 3.5 is required. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.7 January 25, 2016 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified the sending of expiration notification emails to only be sent to the new administrative email recipient instead of to all contacts with email addresses. The administrative email is the default recipient defined on the Email tab of the Options screen. This email recipient is now required if email is enabled. Fixed a bug in our tracing/logging that caused an RTE on non-English language systems where the language uses an extended character set. Added the ability to select the time format used wherever time is disp- layed to the user. Historically this format has always been 12 hr with am/pm suffix. You can now select 24 hr format on the Global Options tab of the Options screen. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.6 November 2, 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed minor compatibility issue with Windows Server 2016 TP3. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.5 June 24, 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the WebPage MO that resulted in checking commented out links when they should be ignored. Fixed bug in Ping MO retry count. The Ping MO always pings at least one time. The retry count is the number to times to retry if the first ping fails. So a retry count of zero will ping one time. Previously you had to set the retry count to 1 to get the first ping. Fixed a bug in how the Ping MO handles Time-to-Live (TTL). This could cause pings to other networks through routers to fail when they should be successful. This would only happen if TTL is non-zero. Our Network Scan using Ping would fail to find hosts due to this error. Corrected a problem in the installer on Windows server 2014 and 2016 that caused install errors due to changes in those operating systems. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.4 May 8, 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the Schedule Object that caused the Scan on Last Day of the Month option to not work. Fixed several other minor bugs in WMI based monitored objects. Fixed minor screen formatting issues that occur on Windows 7. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.3 February 18, 2015 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Correct a bug in the changes to TAPI (phone) paging function introduced in v5.4.2. Added new paging TAP_Gateway.msg file for the "TAP Gateway" service. Fixed a bug in SNPP paging that caused timeouts with some SNPP service providers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.2 October 27, 2014 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the TAPI (phone) paging function that could result in the modem line not being closed properly and subsequent paging attempts to fail. Modified to support Windows 10 and Server 2015. The actual name of the server release is not known yet so we are calling it 2015. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.1 August 18, 2014 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem created when changing the configuration name (copying) on the Global Options tab. After saving the configuration with a new name, NightWatch would not start reporting license error 3. Fixed several minor issues with the installer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.4.0 July 09, 2014 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Instituted new licensing scheme. All licenses are DataCenter Edition, Unlimited monitored objects and will include Data Base Reporting and RoomAlert. All licenses will allow installation on two systems. Exist- ing licenses will be automatically upgraded. You must be on support to receive the upgrade. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.14 June 2, 2014 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the code that maintains the SQL reporting database. Any errors encountered updating the database were not reported to the user. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.13 February 3, 2014 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated the Windows System Monitored Object for Windows 8 and 2012. Due to major changes to the Twitter API, the logging and alarm notifi- cations via Twitter message feature has been disabled. There are no plans to fix this issue at this time. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.12 November 25, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a variety of small bugs which were found during a recent retest of the product. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.11 September 13, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the EventLog MO that could cause a loop to occur if the eventlog wraps or is cleared at the same time we are reading it. The WMI Explorer screen had a bug that caused it to not display all of the Win32 WMI classes, only those directly associated with the class Win32_ComputerSystem. All Win32 classes are now displayed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.10 August 15, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated the PAGERINF.txt file which lists the known paging services and thier phone numbers. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.9 June 12, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several minor bugs that could cause a hang on shutdown. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.8 May 2, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug that caused a run time error on shutdown if you were using the old style main screen (without tree view on left). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.7 March 13, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed the SQL Query MO to properly handle queries that return a closed recordset. Closed recordset is treated as no records returned. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.6 January 23, 2013 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added additional Monitored Objects to the Paging Edition (free support) license. Those MOs are: PING, Temper GOLD, Windows System, AXIS CAMERA, MBSA, Windows Update, EMAIL Ping, EMAIL Check, EMAIL TO PAGE, NOVELL Server and FAILSAFE Server. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.5 December 21, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several bugs in the TAPI telephone notification feature. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.4 November 28, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed two more bugs related to notification changes made in v5.3 that can cause problems with Tapi calls. Added a new feature to the Alternate Main screen (treeview). Under the Settings pull down menu you can choose to show MO Descriptions instead of MO identifiers (if a description is present) in the treeview. This can be useful in some cases where MO identifiers are not descriptive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.3 November 1, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug introduced in 5.3 that failed to mark Skype SMS notifica- tions as completed, resulting in such notifications repeating. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.2 June 20, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Minor adjustments for Windows 8 compatibility. Fixed a bug in the TAPI voice notification. The Silence Threshold value was not being properly applied when making a call. Fixed several minor bugs in SNMP mibs and mib processing code. Fixed bug in Disk Drives MO that resulted in a run time error when it encountered a DVD-ROM drive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3.1 April 30, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fix problem where run time errors in screen updating code would stop on a message box waiting for ok button click. This would suspend operation unessesarily. These RTE are recorded on the log window and operation continues. Fixed a bug in OPSLib that caused occaisional RTE 462 errors during the shutdown process. Added a new alarm message substituion parameter to the Service MO. This parm, STATENAME, will return the state of the Service as a word instead of an integer value. Updated the Pre-Defined Monitored Object definition file (PDMO.txt) to reflect firmware changes in the RoomAlert 11E environment monitoring device. Please note that as of this date, this product has not been tested on Windows 8. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.3 February 16, 2012 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new monitored object, TEMPer Sensor, which supports monitoring the TEMPer series temperature & humidity sensor devices from PCsensor. These devices can be connected to PCs on your network or to the network itself to place temperature and humidity sensors at multiple locations in your organization and these sensors can be centrally monitored by NightWatch. See the online help for more information. Added support for dialing telephones directly and speaking notification messages over the phone connection without the use of Skype. Requires a TAPI compliant voice capable modem. See the online help for more infor- mation. Added support for Voice Over IP (VOIP) notifications. This employs the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) to connect over your network or the internet to voip clients or to regular telephones (through a gateway). See the online help for more information. Added the Run Statistics display from the Status Screen as an option on Main screen (tree view). You can toggle the display of run statistics on the Main screen Settings pull down menu. Dropped support for Windows NT and 2000. Extensive bug fixes and improvements made after 5.2.12 was closed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.12 October 3, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For some time, the Microsoft .Net Framework has been required for some functions within NightWatch. Because of confusion over which functions need the Framework and some functions required different versions of the Framework, it is now required that .Net Framework version 3.5 or later be present. Fixed a design issue in SNMP Trap MO. When a trap arrived during the scan of an SNMP Query MO, the trap processing failed to retrieve the name of the agent that sent the trap. Without the name, matching the trap to a Trap MO by agent name would fail. Now the trap and query MOs snmp requests are separated and can occur at the same time. Fixed a bug in the Email Ping MO when using MAPI as the transport. The deletion of ping messages after processing could fail. Fixed a design issue in using Skype, SIP and TAPI voice notifications. These methods use text-to-speech to create .wav files which are then 'played' over thier connections. The text-to-speech code had an edit for the presence of a sound card and would not do these notification methods if the system had no sound card. Sound card is only required if the alarm message will be 'spoken' on the hosting system and is not required to create the .wav files for the other notification methods. The edit for sound card is removed when speaking to .wav file. A number of issues have surfaced regarding voice notifications sent via SKYPE. Skype version 5.1 works as documented and no significant issues are known. However, Skype versions 5.3 and 5.5 present a number of new problems: 1) Skype 5.3 and 5.5 work when used by NightWatch running on desktop. They do not work when used by NightWatch running as a service. There is no fix at this time. 2) If you choose to use Skype 5.3 or 5.5 on the desktop, after you in- stall Skype, you must reinstall NightWatch 5.2.12 or later. 3) If you use Skype 5.3 or 5.5 on Vista or later, NightWatch can start and attach to the Skype client. NightWatch cannot attach to an existing instance of the Skype client unless the client is run as an adminis- trator. You can set this on the Skype.exe executable. 4) All versions of Skype may not auto login when started by NightWatch. If this occurs, contact tech support for a registry fix. We highly recommend staying with Skype 5.1 as it presents the least issues and works reliably (and displays fewer windows). Skype 5.1 can be downloaded here: http://www.oldapps.com/skype.php?old_skype=97 Fixed a bug in the SNMP Mib Explorer screen that could result in an RTE when the mib file corresponding to an SNMP agent was missing an object definition or completely missing. Inlcuded ConfigReport.exe v1.0.1 which fixes a bug where ConfigReport would fail if the configuration contained an empty MO Group. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.11 August 08, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified the licensing scheme to change the Paging Edition license into the new Free License. The Free License allows 10 Ping MOs only. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.10 July 11, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug that caused an RTE when a single quote was used in a Contacts name, as in: Bill's Email. The RTE would occur when creating the tree view used in the Alternate interface screen. Corrected a bug in the Bandwidth MO. Some devices do not define the QLEN interface mib value and that would cause the entire Bandwidth MO to fail for that device. Fixed to ignore the missing mib value and con- tinue processing the other mib values retrieved from the agent. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.9 May 25, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in the FTP GET monitored object. When retrieving multi- ple files from the remote directory, the purge source file option did not purge the retrieved files. If retrieving a specific file name, the purge worked correctly. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.8 May 20, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in the product licensing code that has caused problems on some host systems. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.7 March 14, 2011 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Skype 5.1 client has several bugs that caused our Skype based alarm notification features to fail. Work arounds have been added to our code and the Skype based notifications will work correctly with this client. Added buttons to Skype Tab on More Options screen to request immediate test of Skype configuration. Corrected a bug in SNMP v2 trap handling. Corrected a bug in the Main screen node counts in the left pane tree view. If alarms were cleared, the node counts were not updated for the cleared alarms. Corrected a bug in Event Log MO that could result in a loop when trying format event records with multi-level event messages and certain errors occurred during the multi-level message retrieval process. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.6 December 7, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new feature to the Main screen (new format). You can select a new option on the Settings pull down menu which will display the count of items on each node of the tree view in the left pane. Updated the Web Status pages for improved formatting. Added new feature to reduce the size of the boxes on the System View page. The smaller boxes allow more systems to be displayed without scrolling. This can be selected on the System View page. If you would like small system boxes to be the default, set Globals registry value WebStatusSmallSystem to "True". Users have asked for resizable object add/change screens for years. To retrofit resizing to the existing screens was a very complex job and was never scheduled. Now, new technology is available that streamlines adding resizing to existing screens. That technology has been added to a number of screens in this release. The Windows Performance Counter Query MO has long had problems with reporting error C0000CB6 (Invalid Data) on the first attempt to read data from the counter query. Subsequent data reads worked correctly. This MO has been modified to ignore this specific error on the first read of a new counter query. Fixed bugs in both the MBSA and Windows Update MOs related to new ver- sions of these products released by Microsoft. Fixed various minor user interface bugs on a number of screens. Fixed various bugs in the new license control scheme introduced in the 5.2.5 release. Fixed bug in Web Status that caused a run time error when refreshing the web page for MOs with long lists of sub-objects (like SNMP Query). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.5 September 8, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Normally, a new license key is required on each change of minor version such as when you go from 5.1 to 5.2. This release contains a change to the license key process and as such will require a new license key to be issued to you by your distributor. When you install 5.2.5, your lic- ense will revert to a 30-day demo license. Contact your distributor for a new permanent license key. Fixed several minor bugs in the user interface. The EventLog MO has a new alarm text substitution parameter. The para- meter [EVENTDESCNQ] which will return the current event record's desc- ription text with all quote characters removed. On SNMP TRAP MOs, when a trap was received, the alarm message as shown in the Alarm Text field was issued. However, the list of SNMP variables included in the trap was automatically dumped on a second line of the alarm message. This dump of trap variables could not be turned off. This behavior was a design error. You should be able to control display of the trap variables. This has been fixed to NOT dump the variables. If you wish to include the dump, add the new substitution [TRAPVARS] to the alarm message. To see the alarm message as it was before, the alarm text would be: [TYPE] \p[TRAPNAME] received from [SOURCE]\x[TRAPVARS]. Fixed a bug in the Event Log MO add/change screen introduced recently. The search strings field would only accept a file name when it should accept search strings, search script or a file name. When logging to disk and rolling the log file over to a new file when the current log reached max size and the log file extension was set to automatically use an increasing number for the new log file, when the extension number went from 999 to 1000, a run time error would occur. This bug is fixed and roll over of numeric extensions now occurs at 99999 and will roll over to 1. If you have problems with alerts repeating unexpectedly, please read about the change to Alarm processing and repeating schedules below. Many customers are having problems with this after installing 5.2.5 because they have thier Alarm objects set to repeat the alerting sched- ule. The schedule repeat function has changed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.4 May 10, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in OPSLib that could result in run time error 91 when you shutdown too soon after startup. Increased the default size of the Main screen (alternate format). Increased the size of the new Monitored Object Selection screen. Also modified the selection screen to show the MO names in blue if there is one or more of that MO type already in your configuration. Fixed a bug in Alarm Processing for Descrete MOs. If a Descrete MO was associated with an Alarm Object that employed a notification schedule, the schedule was not correctly processed when the end of the schedule was reached. If the schedule was not set to repeat, new new alarms were not reported until the MO's alarm state was cleared. If the schedule was set to repeat, the repeat of the schedule would not start until the next alarm was detected by the MO, not on the next scan as is expected. Renamed the ePage Monitored Object to "Email to Page". This was done to better communicate the function of the MO. Modified Web Status to support user customization. If you wish to cust- omize the Web Status html files, you can create a sub directory in the install directory called "WebCustom". Copy any files you wish to modify to this directory. Files in this directory will not be overwritten by a subsequent install. Create a registry string key "WebStatusCustom" in the Globlas section and set the value to "True". This setting causes the Web Status server to look in the WebCustom directory for Web Status html files. If files are not found in WebCustom, then they will be read from the install directory as in the past. For now, image files will continue to be read from the standard web and web16 directories, which will be overwritten on subsequent installs. NightWatch now automatically checks for updates when started. When a new version is available a notification will be logged at startup and a menu item will appear on the menu bar stating an update is available. Clicking the item will open a browser to the update download website. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.3 March 22, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Starting with Windows Vista, the Event Log system was replaced with a new second generation event log system called "Windows Event Log" (no kidding). The documentation indicated that existing event log API set would be forward compatible with the new event log scheme. Testing did support this and no changes to our code appeared to be required. As it turns out, the old APIs are in fact not 100% compatible with the new scheme. Some events from code that had been updated to use the new log scheme would not return event description text to via the old APIs. This was not found in testing because few programs had been updated to the new scheme. As time has moved forward we have now started seeing events in the log that would not return descriptions to our code. The solution to this problem requires the use of the new Windows Event Log API. However, this API requires the .Net Framework 3.5 to be installed and only works when our code is hosted on Vista or later. Our code now looks at the OS version of the target system of an Event Log MO and the hosting system OS version and if both systems are Vista or later, and the .Net Framework 3.5 is installed on the hosting system, then the new event log API is used. If these conditions are not met, then the old API is used and some events may not return thier description text. On the Web Status System View display, if you right-click on a system object, the context menu listed a choice of "View System Details". This feature has not yet been implemented and this menu choice should not have appeared. It has been removed pending the implementation of this status display in a future release. If you enable scan logging and have the log file set to overflow by creating a new file with date&time string as the file extension and you then later switch to a sequential number as the scanlog file extension, if there are any scanlog files with the date&time extension present in the install directory, we will fail with RTE 6-overflow on next attempt to open a scanlog file. This is fixed. Fixed a bug in the logging via MSN Messenger feature. Messenger users known to Hotmail could receive notification of waiting email during the Messenger login process. Our code did not correctly handle this notifi- cation, failed to complete the login process and reported login ok. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.2 March 16, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in the Speech Tab of the More Options screen. Selecting some of the speaking options would cause a Run Time Error. When using notification via MSN Messenger, if you supplied an incorrect MSN user name or password, our code incorrectly reported the problem as a timeout. We now indicate login has failed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2.1 March 3, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug that would cause an endless loop during configuration load at startup. This problem only occured on Windows 2000 systems. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.2 February 22, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This release features two new Monitored Objects. The MBSA MO will scan a target Windows system using the Microsoft Base- line Security Analyzer and generate alarms if security issues are found on that system. A detailed report of the issues is available for view- ing in Web Status. See the on-line help for more information. The Windows Update MO will check a target system for updates that are available but not applied. An alarm is generated if updates are missing on that system. A detailed report of the missing updates is available for viewing in Web Status. See the on-line help for more information. On the Alternate Interface Main screen, Navigation tab, consolidate the Enabled and Suspened columns into one. Improve the 16x16 icons used on the Alternate Interface Main screen. Improve the 16x16 gifs used by Web Status. On the Alternate Interface Main screen, the tree view now shows an in- dicator of MO state by overlaying a colored triangle on the MO icon. A red triangle will appear if the MO is in the alarm state, a yellow triangle if in the Processing Error state and a grey triangle if the MO is suspended or disabled. The SMTP code used to send alarm notification emails did not support email servers that require connections secured with SSL. Added a new advanced version of SMTP code that does support SSL. You continue to configure sending SMTP alarm emails on the Email Tab of the Options screen but you can now go to the Email Tab of the Options2 screen to enable use of the advanced SMTP code and SSL connections. This only applies to alarm emails. The Email Ping MO was also updated to support using advanced SMTP to send ping messages. The POP3 email reading code used by the Email Check, Email Ping and ePage MOs did not support secure connections. Added new advanced POP3 code to allow reading of email via POP3 over a secure connection. Note that use of the advanced POP3/SMTP options for secure connections is supported on Windows 2000 or later and requires the .Net Framework 2.0 to be installed on the hosting system. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1.3 January 15, 2010 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- For hosting systems with multiple network cards (NIC), added a registry key that allows you to select which of the system's IP addresses that the Web Status server will listen on. The Globals key 'WebStatusIPAddr' can be set to the IP address of the NIC that Web Status will listen on and will be published in alarm emails. If this key is not set, then the NIC that Web Status listens on will be selected automatically. In Alpha Numeric Paging script (AN script) the R command matches text read from the modem to control the flow of interaction with the paging service. The R command matched the strings coded in the script to modem data as case-sensitive. This caused problems when one of the services changed thier pager ID prompt from Pager ID? to pager ID?. Changed the R command to match strings case-insensitive. The Disk Space MO had a bug where alarm messages from volumes and pro- cessing error messages from other volumes were mixed together. Fixed to report the last processing error ecountered unless an alarm is raised. Alarms take precedence over processing errors. Fixed bug in sending alarm emails via MAPI. Simple alarm format had the first 3 characters of the subject line truncated. Modified Disk File MO to accept very large file size value. Modified Microsoft network scann to support the Symantec SNAC network provider. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1.2 October 21, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several bugs in MibExplorer screen. Fixed bug in Alarm Object. Was not saving the Override Contact Quiet value to the registry. Fixed bug in Web Status. Was dropping MO icon on refresh of MO detail web page. Fixed several bugs in the Alternate Main screen that caused run time errors. Fixed several bugs in the Status and System View screens that resulted in incorrect context menu actions. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1.1 August 28, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in ScriptGlobals.SendMail function. Text submitted with this function as message body was incorrectly truncated at 255 characters. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.1 July 8, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Major upgrade to the Web Status service code to improve responsiveness. Major redesign of Web Status. Eliminate Java Applets, improved naviga- tion, added System View, use of Ajax to update pages without refresh, improved formatting and content of status displays for MOs, Room Alert2 MO status display expanded with gauges and 24 hour history chart. Added Alarm notification via Twitter. Added Vista Sidebar Gadget application as additional status reporting capability for Vista desktops. See help for details. Added support for Windows 2008 to the Windows System Check MO. Added support for Windows 7 to the Windows System Check MO. Added Vista System Performance Counters pre-defined MO. Added Windows 7 System Performance Counters pre-defined MO. Various modifications for compatibility with Windows 7. Note that for correct operation, NightWatch must be run as an administrator on Windows Vista, 2008 and 7. The installer now configures this automatically for these operating systems. Added option to the Settings pull down menu to minimize directly to the task tray instead of the taskbar. Modifed the new MO selection screen to not show the Windows NT, XP and 2000 MOs. These MOs are superceded by the Windows System MO which can handle all Windows operating systems. The older MOs are still supported but not available when creating new MOs. Modified the Disk Space MO to better support tera-byte disk volumes. Added a feature to print a listing of the configuration. This is a new program added to the install package that will read and format the .cfg file created when you save the configuration to a file. This function can be invoked from a choice on the Settings menu. Requires Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 to be installed. Improved the Database Archiving reports with new selection capabilities and display of selection criteria in the report header. Please note the changes to the reports require that you run SA for at least one full scan and then stop scanning. This action will cause the database struc- ture to be updated with a new field used by the reports. Fixed bug in Bandwidth MO. It improperly reported processing errors as alarms. Fixed bug in Bandwidth MO. In some cases, the add/change screen did not display all of the interfaces available on the target system. Fixed several errors in the Database archiving system. Fixed several errors in the Axis Camera MO. Fixed minor errors in TCP & UDP service MOs. Fixed several errors in the SnmpQuery MO Add/Change and MibExlorer screens. Fixed a design error in the PerfQuery, WmiQuery, SnmpQuery and Room Alert 2 MOs. These MOs were logging thier data samples to the Event Console. This is not really correct as the Event Console is supposed to record events of significance. Showing the data samples in the console floods theonsole with records and reduces its usefulness. Data samples are no longer sent to the Event Console. The will continue to be logged to the database archive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.10 April 14, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem with Database logging. When db logging is enabled, on the first configuration save after that, all the MOs are posted to the database. After that, only new/changed MOs are posted to the db. If db logging was disabled and then reenabled later, new MOs or changes to existing MOs made while logging was disabled, were not posted to the db when logging was reenabled. This resulted in incorrect db reports. If you use database logging, it is reccomeneded that you go into the Options Database Tab and disable the Database then save the configura- tion. Then go back to the Database Tab and reenable the Database. Then save the configuration again. This will ensure your Database is updated with the current state of all MOs. After that, MO posting will be done correctly only as needed. Fixed a bug in logging Processing Errors to the Database. In order to log Processing Errors to the db, you must select an Alarm object to be used for Processing Errors on the Global Options Tab. However, if no notification action is selected on that Alarm object, the Processing Error would NOT be sent to the db. Now Processing Errors are logged even if no notification action is selected on the AO. Fixed a bug in the Eventlog Database Report. It did not correctly sel- ect records when a Selection Field was specified and the Errors Only option was set to True. Fixed a bug in the Event Log MO. The Suppress Duplicate Events option was not correctly retained and if turned on, would be turned back off at the next time you clicked Save in the Options screen. Updated the Database Report Viewer and several of the Database Reports to offer additional data selection options. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.9 January 23, 2009 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a buffer overflow problem that could cause the login to the MSN Messenger service for IM logging to fail. Our product Icon now appears in the browser URL bar, favorites and tabs when you use Web Status. Fixed several problems in OPSLib that resulted in memory leaks when Host Login MOs or the SQL Database logging feature were used. The SNMP Mib Explorer screen can handle a maximum of 32000 items in the Mib tree used to display the mib objects. Previously the screen would crash if the mib contained more than 32000 objects. Now the screen will stop walking the mib at this limit and display the first 32000 objects. Fixed several problems in OPSLib that caused hangs or RTEs when using the Database feature. Fixed a bug in SNMP Trap MO and one in the mibx files that resulted in some object IDs not being translated into thier names as defined in mib files. Fixed a bug in SNMP Trap MO that resulted in incorrect name lookup for SNMP v2 traps. SNMP v1 traps were handled correctly. Fixed an RTE that occured when opening the Speech Tab if the currently selected voice or sound card has been deleted from the system. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.8 September 24, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in Log File and Directory Monitored Objects that did not log the start of scanning of these MOs before operations on these MOs were begun. This gave the appearance of a hang as nothing appeared to be in progress looking at the log. Fixed the timeout used when checking the availablility of Windows based systems over the network. The timeout was too short and caused spurious results and error messages to be logged in some cases. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.7 August 13, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified the Event Log monitored object to support event consolidation. With this option enabled, when the MO enters an alarm state, events are recorded and duplicate events will be logged but won't generate a new alarm notification after the first. When the alarm state is cleared the event record is cleared. Events are identified by a concatenation of the source computer, event source and event Id number. Modified the Email Check MO to include an option to generate an alarm when no email messages are found that match the selection criteria. Modified the Disk File MO to include an option to create a checksum of the file and recheck it on each scan. This will detect changes to the file that are not reflected in the file size. Modified the DialUp modem MO to support dialing fax machines. Dialing fax machines requires a new dialing script, DialUpFaxTest.msg to dial fax machins successfully. The DialUp MO now supports the selection of the dialing script to use to the fax script can be selected. This also allows new scripts to be easily added. Fixed a bug in the Skype notification feature that would cause a run time error at shutdown. Fixed a bug in Web Status that would allow browser users to view files outside our install directory. Fixed a bug in Email Ping MO. Starting with version 5, a ping message sent via MAPI had the first 3 characters of the subject truncated. Now correctly sets the ping message subject. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.6 April 9, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Correct several bugs in the Disk File MO. It did not work correctly in all combinations of the Close File After Scan, Delete File After Scan and Report on File Found options. Fix bug in Web Page MO. The MO did not correctly construct the Urls for images contained in web pages for all formats of relative Urls. Fix bug in Disk Space MO. It would report an error on disk volumes with a volume name more than 31 characters in length. Volume names up to the system maximum size are supported though they may be truncated for dis- play. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.5 February 26, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Our on-line help was authored in WinHelp (WinHelp32) format. Starting with Windows Vista, WinHelp is no longer supported. Microsoft provided a patch for Vista which allowed WinHelp based help to function and this patch was included in our 5.0.3 install. However, this patch is not available for Windows 2008. In order to be able to run on Windows 2008 our WinHelp based on-line help has been converted to the new HtmlHelp format. This help works on all versions of Windows we support and will be the help format that will used from this point forward. The HtmlHelp form of our help is stored in the Help.chm file. The old WinHelp based help, stored in Help.hlp, will continue to be included in the install for the time being but will not be updated. Fixed a bug in the SNMP Query MO. If you leave the target system field blank, the MO will default to 127.0.0.1, which is the local system. Fixed a bug in the new Alternate Interface. If you added Pre-Defined MOs from the Alternate Interface, you could get duplicate MOs added to the configuration. This would result in an RTE on the next restart. Modified the Disk Space MO to do an RPC check on the target system pri- or to reading the disk space information. This will prevent waiting for the very long timeout that occurs if you call for disk space info on a system is not available. There is now a Registry key in Globals called IncludeTitleInEmail which controls if the monitored object description is included in the body of an email alarm notification. This key defaults to True which contines the current behavior. This key allows this title information to be left out of the email so that the message body contains only the text of the alarm message. The Win32 Process MO has been renamed the Windows Process MO as this MO works with both 32 and 64 bit target Windows systems. Fixed a bug in SNMP Trap handling that might result in the description of the trap not being retrieved from the MIB database. Fixed a bug in the internal Wait routine (which allows us to wait for long running operations to complete without freezing our process) that would cause the Wait call to not end (appearing as a hang). This issue only applied to some of the MOs and only if the wait routine was called within a second of midnight. Previously, the Alarm Group names entered on the Contact Add/Change screen did not allow embedded spaces. However the screen did not edit for this and the help did not point out this restriction. Group names with spaces would not work correctly. This release now allows embedded spaces in Group names. The only character disallowed is the semi-colon. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.4 January 25, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem in the EventLog MO. The MO allowed for 25 substitution strings in an event message. If a log recored had more than 25 strings we would fail with an RTE. Expanded to 64 strings. Fixed a problem with the Performance Counter MO. It did not retain the setting of the Log Samples option when the configuration was saved. Fixed a bug in the installer. On 64-bit systems, it would hang near the end and not complete. It was found that if you waited long enough, it would actually finish, but it was delayed waiting for the completion of the self-extracting zip files that are executed as the last step of the install process. The self-extracting zips extract correctly, but do not exit for a number of minutes after completion and the installer would wait for them. Now, on 64-bit systems the installer does not wait for the self-extractors to complete. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.3 January 8, 2008 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The "Standalone" level of licensing for this product had been renamed "Lite". No change to the monitored objects or access allowed to this level of license. Added a new feature to the Skype inteface. You can now send alarms via SMS using the Skype SMS gateway. This can be useful when you cellular service provider does not have an email SMS gateway. Skype supports SMS to all service providers world wide and is a fee based service. See the help on the Skype configuration screen for details on using Skype SMS. Fixed a bug that turned off the Alternate Interface Screen option if NightWatch was run as a service. Fixed a bug that prevented the Disk Log file overflow from working. Modified the More Options screen to not fail with an RTE if the Micro- soft Speech Library is not installed. Speech will be disabled if the library is not installed. Fixed several bugs that caused RTEs if the host system had no audio device (or it was disabled) and you accessed the More Options tab or selected spoken audible alarms. Fixed several problems with Web Status security checking. The WinHelp32 library, which we use to display our online help, was dropped from Windows Vista. This was overlooked during Vista testing. Our install has been modified to install the WinHelp32 update for Vista by invoking Microsoft Update. You may also install this update from the Microsoft web site or by running WinHelp4Vista.msu found in our install directory. Fixed a bug in the Quiet Times selection Screen. When using the new Alternate Interface, if you invoked the Contact Add/Change screen from a Context menu (right-click) on the Alternate Interface screen, then entered the Quiet Times selection screen, the context menu used on the Quiet Times selection screen to set quiet times (by clicking a time of day box and then right-clicking to set the quiet time value) would not display. This problem was caused by trying to open a new context menu while inside the event processing of an existing context menu. Fixed a problem in the HostVolume MO. When used on VMS systems, the MO would fail to match reported volumes to the volumes defined in the MO. You may now customize HostTypes.txt and save to LocalHostTypes.txt so that your changes are not overlayed during update. LocalHostTypes.txt if present, is loaded instead of HostTypes.txt. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.2 October 11, 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new option to Alarm and Contact objects for sending alarm noti- fications by email. You can select the Simple Format option to have the email messages formatted with the notification text only. This reduces the length of the email message to the mimimum possible. This improves sending alerts via SMS using email based SMS gateways. Fixed several bugs in the new alternate interface screen. Fixed Axis Camera MO to record downtime in the same manner as other event based MOs. Added a log message (level 2) to the Axis Camera MO to record when the MO captures an image from the camera and stores it on disk. Fixed a bug where configuration settings for Skype alarm notifications were not being saved to the registry. Fixed a bug that caused a Run Time Error when sending a test message via SNPP. Fixed a bug that caused a Run Time Error at startup when installed on a localized, non-english version of Windows. Fixed a security problem with Web Status. If you set Web Status to req- uire a user name and password, then once a browser on a client attached to Web Status and provided the authentication, any browser instance on that client would be accepted for the duration of our execution. Even if you closed the browser and restarted, you would not be prompted to re-authenticate. This problem has been fixed and any new browser ins- tance from the same client PC will be detected and re-authenticated. Note that there is no logout mechanisim available. The only way to end a browsers authentication is to close the browser. To assist with this requirement, there is now a Logout button on the Web Status button menu which will close the browser window. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.1 September 10, 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new right-click context-menu choice that will reset the % Down Time for a monitored object. This is available on the Status window and the new Alternate Interface Main window. On the alternate interface this new choice is available for groups of MOs (such as all, by type, by severity, etc). Warning: if you reset the % Down Time for an MO, any outstanding alarms will be cancelled and the down time data is reset to zero immediately. This action is not confirmed and cannot be undone. Added a registry key Globals\SmtpPort that will override the default SMTP mailing port number of 25. Use this when your mail server is using a different port. This sets the port used for sending alarm emails and the Email Ping MO. Corrected a problem in the new Alternate Interface Main screen that caused the status bar at the bottom of the screen to be drawn poorly when the screen is displayed on a desktop using the XP/Vista native display themes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.0.0 July 30, 2007 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- In an effort to make large configurations more manageable, there is a new alternate Main window available. This new interface has an explorer style design and is fully resizeable. You may enable the alternate Main window on the Settings pull down menu. After restarting, the new Main window will appear. The new Main window has various ways to view and navigate your configuration and works with NightWatch objects directly. This new interace is in development and is available now as a preview. We encourage you to take a look and give us your feedback on the new interface. Added new Monitored Object Disk Drives. This MO will monitor attributes of physical drives on the local or a remote system and raise an alarm if problem conditions are detected on a drive. See the online help for details. Added new Monitored Object WMI Events. This MO uses WMI Events to watch for events on the local or remote systems. A WMI event is created and posted to the target system on scan startup. This event then monitors for occurences of the defined event on that system. NightWatch does not have to scan for such events. If an event occurs, the WMI event monitor will notify NightWatch that the event has occured generating an alarm. This allows for events to be monitored in an asynchronous fashion and reduce overhead on NightWatch's hosting system and on the network. See the online help for details. It is now possible to have alarms spoken using the Windows support for Speech. On the Options 2 tab, in the audible alarms box, enter the word "Speak" and alarm text will be spoken. A new Options tab, called "More Options", hosts a tab where you can customize the speech. See online help for details. It is now possible to send spoken alerts via the Skype VOIP client. You can configure Alarm objects to send alarms as calls to Skype clients or to physical telephones via the SkypeOut feature. This requires the Skype client to be installed on system hosting NightWatch. Logging via Skype chat is also supported. See the online help for details. NightWatch now supports recording scans, events, alarms and alarm noti- fications in an SQL database. This allows for historical collection of monitoring data and subsequent reporting and analysis. The database can be created in SQL 2000 or later and NightWatch can be configured to record information to the database while scanning. A Report Viewing application and sample reports are included. The database feature is an additional charge add-on to NightWatch. See the online help for more information. This feature, while available now, is still being refined and should be viewed as a "preview" technology. Note that the Report Viewing feature requires the .Net Framework 2.0 and Crystal Reports 10 runtime to be installed on the system that will run the Report Viewer. Improved the accuracy of statistical information collected to support the database feature. You may now define a global Schedule which is applied to all MOs when scanning. An MO must pass the scheduling criteria of the global Sched- ule before any Schedule defined at the MO level is applied. Added a new log file, Errors.log, that will record processing errors. You must enable the logging of alarm notifications on the Logging Options tab to have processing errors recorded in this file. Modified the alarm notifications log, Notify.log and the new process- ing errors log, Errors.log, to be subject to the same overflow and file extension settings as the scan log file, as set on the Logging Options tab. Scan logging does not have to be enabled to set these items for the notification and error logs. If logging of alarm notifications is enabled, Alarm objects would log any external notifications (email, broadcast, etc) they generate in the file Notify.log. However, if an Alarm object did not define any actions, there would be nothing recorded in Notify.log. Alarm objects have been fixed to record any execution of themselves in Notify.log. Modified the Disk File MO to add two additional processing options. Normally, this MO reads all new records in the target file since the last scan and reports all matches. You can now select to have the MO stop reading the file on the first record match that occurs. On the next scan, the MO will pick up reading the file where it left off. You can additionally have the MO stop reporting matches on the first match but advance the file to the current EOF, so the next scan will only new records. Fixed the NetWare Server MO to report when it is unable to connect to the server due to a configuation problem instead of reporting this as the server being down. Fixed the Host Volume MO to report when there are problems processing the data returned by target systems with SNMP instead of reporting this as a volume problem. Fixed alarm escalation errors on MOs that have monitored sub objects. These MOs would escalate for each sub object found to be in alarm state instead of once for the scan of the MO. TCP/UDP Serivce, Perf Counter, SNMP Query and Host Volume MOs had this problem. Fixed bug in the Web Status code that caused audible alarms to fail to work on Web Status pages. Fixed bug in the Web Status code that caused problems with IE7. In some cases, IE7 would repeatedly prompt for permission to display Web Status pages due to the applets embedded in the pages. Fixed bug in Scan timer. If you clicked the Stop button while counting down to the next scan and then restarted scanning with the Start button the scan interval could be shortened to the the time that was remaining on the count down when the Stop button was clicked. From that point on the interval would be short until NightWatch was restarted. Fixed a bug in the Event Log MO. If NightWatch was unable to find the message text associated with an event, it blanked out the event message text in reporting of the event. This was incorrect in that even if the event message text cannot be found, there is usually still useful in- formation that can be displayed. This information is now reported in it's raw form if the message text cannot be found. The Windows Performance Counter Query MO now has an option to record the counter samples it takes to the new Archive database. This is simi- lar to the sample recording already available for the SNMP Query MO. In the case of the Performance Counter MO, samples are not recorded to a disk file, only the database. The SNMP Query MO will continue to log samples to a disk file but will also log them to the database. In both cases, you must turn on sample logging for each Perf Counter or SNMP query MO and have database archiving enabled samples to be recorded. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4.5 December 8, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug that caused RTE 9 to occur when SNMP Query MO was reading the target SNMP MIB. Fixed bugs in HostVolume/snmp that failed to handle missing objects in the target mib gracefully. Fixed WMI Explorer window to be resizeable. Fixed bug in Web Status, Event Console page, that would cause the page to fail after toolbar button press, if the browser url system address component was 'localhost'. Fix bug in Email Ping MO caused by 4.4.3 changes to smtp mailer code that generates the email subject from the alarm message text. This bug would cause Email Ping MO to not detect it's ping messages and report an erroneous failure to ping. In the Options screen Email Tab, you can now have Email enabled and leave the Default Recipient blank. This means Email can be enabled but no messages will be sent unless there is an email recipient defined in the Alarm or Contact objects. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4.4 October 20, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several probelms with the WebPage MO that would cause it to fail when doing a forms based login. Added a Clear button to the Paging Queue window to allow the paging queue to be emptied. Added registry key Gloabls.ApplyQuietToPaging to prevent page requests from being added to the paging queue during global quiet time. Fixed the Messaging feature to correct problems connecting to the MSN servers. Updated to reflect changes to the protocol by Microsoft. Fixed bug in WebStatus that would cause looping page refresh on Mozilla browsers. Fixed bug in emailing that resulted in Run Time Error 5 during mailing of alarm email messages without subjects. Previously when installing on Terminal Server systems, you had to set your session into TS install mode by opening a command box and issuing the command 'change user /install' before running our installer. Many users failed to do this which resulted in problematic installs. This step is now automatically performed by the installer. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4.3 August 21, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several bugs in the Network View Screen, one of which could cause the Network View Screen to rescan the network when the screen was opened after a restart. Scan should only occur on the very first open of this screen. As of release 4.4.2, email alarms include a url that will take the user to the Web Status page of the MO that generated the alarm email. Some users do not want to have this url in the alarm email. You can disable the inclusion of the url by adding the registry key InlcudeMOUrlInEmail to the Globals section and setting the value to false. Fixed a bug that was introduced in 4.4.2 that would cause a Run Time Error if you had the Alarm as Mail Subject option enabled and you sent a test email from the Options/Email tab. Fixed a bug that was introduced in 4.4.2 that would cause the Schedule Object's "Never Check" option to be ignored. Fixed a design error. The sequence \c is used to mark the alarm clear message text in the MO alarm text field. But in messages that contain a disk directory like \c$ or \c: or \c\ the directory be recognized as an alarm clear marker. We now ignore these 3 character sequences as the alarm clear message text marker. When using Web Status with the FireFox browser, the Refresh button did not work. This is due to a difference in how IE and FireFox are told not to cache web pages. We now send the correct codes to disable cach- ing of our pages by FireFox. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4.2 July 18, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Bandwidth Monitored Object only worked with network interfaces that had a physical address. This excluded serial and loopback interfaces. This restriction is removed and you can now monitor the loopback and serial interfaces. Corrected a problem introduced in 4.4.1 where using the alarm message as the subject of alert emails put too much information into the email subject, in effect the entire alert mail message. Now, only the alarm message itself (as it used to be) is put into the email subject. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4.1 April 20, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified the ScriptGlobals.SendMail function to allow the mail subject and an attachment file to be specified. The funciton calls new form is: SG.SendMail recpient, msgtext, subject, filename The attachment file must be a full path to the file to be included in the email message. Modified the Alarm Object to allow the specification of a Task MO to be executed on Alarm Clear. The existing Task MO is executed on every call to the Alarm object by MOs that use it. The new On Clear Task will be executed when the Alarm is cleared. Fixed a bug in the EmailCheck MO that could result in a run time error if messages in the mail box being read by the MO had attachments. The Directory MO has been converted from Descrete type to Persistent type. This means that the MO style is to detect and report conditions that may occur, persist for some period of time and clear on thier own. This allows the alarm Delay feature to be added to this MO. The checks for directory total size and file count against some expected value are the conditions the MO normally looks for and alarm notification will be delayed for these conditions if Delay is non-zero. This allows these conditions to clear if they are transient and not generate false noti- fications. Note that the alarm on size or file count change checks are events not conditions, and as such alarm notifications for these checks are not subject to the Delay setting. The Win32 Process MO monitors a Windows system with a list of process names to make sure the processes are present. It alarms if the expected processes are not present. You can now have the list of process names function as an approved process list. In this case, processes found on the target system that are not on the approved list will generate an alarm. Emailed alarm notifications have been improved to have more information about the alarm. If Web Status is enabled, the message will incliude a link to the web status page for the Monitored Object that generated the alarm notification. The Alarm Text field on the MO add/change screens now allows the alarm clear message text to be specified. In addition to the \p (prefix), \x (extended) message separators, the new \c separator allows an alarm clear message to be defined for the MO. An example of using \c is: primary message text\xextended message text\calarm clear message text There is a new option to scan only MOs that have been changed during the current execution. This is located on the Options 2 tab and if it is enabled, then only those MOs that have been added or changed since startup will be scaned. This allows new/changed MOs to be test scaned without scanning the entire configuration. Corrected a problem with the UDP Service check MO. Apparently changes to Windows 2000/2003/XP cause this control to fail with an RTE under some conditions. This problem has been fixed and the UDP Serivce Check has been improved to more accurately check UDP services. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.4 February 6, 2006 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added new Monitored Object, Windows System. This MO functions in the same way as the NT System, Windows 2000 System and Windows XP system MOs. It supports all Windows systems in a single MO and adds support for Windows 2003 and Windows Vista. Modified SNMP Query Monitored Object to allow you to edit the names of the SNMP Mib Objects retreived to something more meaningful. Modified WebPage Monitored Object to allow you to select if images are downloaded as part of the web page checking process. Added an option to make a backup of the configuration before a changed is saved. Configuration is backed up to the file Backup.cfg located in the install directory. Added an option to keep a log of alarm notifications sent in the disk file Notify.log located in the install directory. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.7 September 1, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in duplicate instance check that caused failures if we run as a service under LocalSystem user instead of a named user. Fixed bug in license checking of Axis Camera MO. The internal object id number assigned to each Monitored Object is now displayed in the caption bar of each MO Add/Change screen. When installing on a system that is a Terminal Server, you must switch your session into Install Mode before running our install exe. Open a CMD window and issue the command: change user /install to switch to Install Mode. Then run our install. Installation on a Terminal Server should be avoided if possible. The SNMPQUERY MO now supports logging the MIB object values (samples) it retrieves from the target SNMP agent system to a log file. The log file is called SnmpQuery(systemname).log in the install directory. The file will contain one record per scan with the current values for each MIB object separated by commas. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.6 July 27, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The IP address of the MSN Messenger Server (used by the logging/notifi- cation via messenger feature) changed and so caused a failure when the messenger function tried to logon to the messaging server. This has been changed to use the DNS name of the server and so get the current IP address in use by the messaging server. Fixed bug where we did license checking in Maintenance Mode. The Main- tenance mode instance should leave license checking to the service. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.5 June 24, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The detection of another instance of NightWatch already running in order to prevent duplicate instances and support Maintenance Mode (running as a service) has been an area of ongoing problems. The method of instance detection introduced in 4.3.2 again proved to be problematic. This rel- lease tries a new scheme to do instance detection that works reliably in remote sessions and has no side effects! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.4 May 4, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Logging via the .Net Messenger service quit working due to changes in the Messenger protocol by Microsoft. This is fixed. HostLogin MOs now require a timeout as having a zero timeout causes the MO to fail to login. The default timeout is now 10 seconds. The Axis Camera MO is supposed to be available in the Enterprise and DataCenter Editions but was incorrectly available only in DCE. This is fixed and the Axis MO is available under EE and DCE. Fixed several bugs in the RoomAlert 2 MO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.3 March 18, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The implementaiton of SSH tunneling in release 4.3 had a major design error and did not work as described in the documentation. This problem has been fixed in this release. If you are using SSH tunneling, please read the help file information on SSH and review your SSH configuration on the Options screen SSH tab. Fixed a bug in Maintenance Mode where the MM session tried to enable the SNMP trap socket upon exit if SNMP traps are enabled. This would result in an error if the instance of NightWatch running as a service had the SNMP trap socket already open. The socket should not be opened in Maintenance Mode. Fixed a bug in the Axis Camera and Room Alert 2 Monitored objects that caused the camera live video to fail to appear in the Web Status pages for these MOs. Alpha Numeric dial-up paging with the UCP protocol is now supported. Use the UCP.msg AN script file to send page requests to UCP providers. Also note that dial-up paging with ATT and T-Mobile has been discontin- ed by these providers. As of 4.3, a bug in the Performance Counter Query MO Add/Change screen would not allow counters to be deleted. This has been fixed. Fixed a bug in the Disk File MO. If the Alarm on File Found option was checked, no other options were processed including Delete File After Scan. All processing options selected are now done after the File Found option completes it's part of the file scan. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.2 February 1, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug that would cause problems with the Axis Camera notification feature if camera notifications arrived while we are not scanning. Corrected some HTML formatting errors that might cause the Axis Camera MO Web Status page to display incorrectly. Modified the Web Status server code so that Web Status will function correctly when accessed through a firewall. Fixed a bug that could cause the Web Status server code to loop in some rare situations. It was found that the scheme used to detect an already running instance of NightWatch did not work when the second instance was launched in a remote session. This would cause the new Maintenance Mode to fail. The previous instance detection scheme has been redesigned to work when NightWatch is executed in remote sessions. When McAfee firewall products are used to block outgoing ports on the system where NightWatch is located, the port blocking technique used by McAfee resulted in a Run Time Error and shutdown in the TCP/UDP Service Monitored Objects. These MOs have been modified to not to generate RTEs when the outgoing ports are blocked by McAfee. The errors caused by the McAfee port blocking will be logged and the MOs will report that they unable to connect to the target port (service). The SQL Check MO no longer requires a User Name to be specified so that the MO will work with SQL drivers that store the User Name in the DSN. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3.1 January 20, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Previous versions allowed a monitored object to appear more that once in a MO Group on the Options screen. This is not allowed under 4.3 and an existing duplicate MO in a Group would result in an RTE when opening the Options screen. This has been fixed not to fail and to just discard any duplicate MOs in a Group. Changes to the emailing support code in 4.3 resulted in email messages sent by NightWatch having a trailing null character. Some email systems reject mail with null characters in the message. This is now fixed. Fixed bug that allowed auto start to occur when starting up in the new Maintenance Mode. Auto start in MM is not supported and would result in failure. The Email Options Tab now requires a default mail recipient address if mail is enabled. This is to prevent the case where email is enabled but there is no default recipient address and no recpient defined on Alarm or Contact objects and so email alarm notifications would not be sent. The Axis Video Camera Monitored Object has been modified to apply the Schedule (if defined) to motion detection alarms received from cameras. This allows the user to control when motion detection is reported. Note that if capturing images on scans, the schedule will apply to both that scan function and processing of motion detection messages. Fixed bug in Room Alert 2 Monitored Object which failed to handle dead box condition when connected serially after changes for TCP/IP support. Also fixed to simulate Power2 and Flood sensor alarms when doing simu- lations. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.3 January 10, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added support for SSH secure Telnet access to host systems. SSH tunnels can be configured to be used for Host Login, Host Process and Host Vol- ume MOs for secure communication with host systems. Added new SQL Query Monitored Object. This MO will connect to an SQL server system and execute a user defined query and generate an alarm if the query fails or does not return any records. Added new Axis Video Camera Monitored Object. This MO supports Axis 210 network video cameras and will generate alarms in response to motion detection done by the camera. When alarms are generated, the current video image from the camera can be captured. Regular image capture is also supported. When emailing alarm notifications, the video image is included in the email. The Web Status page for this new MO also shows the live video feed from the camera. Modified the Alarm Object to allow a sound file or system sound to be associated with an AO and played when an alarm is processed by the AO. Added a new pre-defined Performance Query MO that will monitor for the presence of NightWatch on another system. Added COCOUNT, COFIND, COGET, COSET functions to ScriptGlobals to allow limited access to Contact Objects from scripts. Added new script function, sh.stopscript that allows scripts that have long running loops to watch for termination signal. Add option to Disk File MO to delete file after scanning it. Add option to Disk File MO to alarm on file age. Because of the large number of fields on the Options screen tabs, the method for highlighting the focus for check boxes and radio buttons has changed. Instead of an inverse video highlight on the label as has been done in the past, the label will have an underline highlight and the text of the label will change to a contrasting color. Windows XP Service Pack 2 may cause problems with NightWatch. WXP SP2 contains the new Windows Firewall service. This service will likely prevent NightWatch from performing network based operations against XP SP2 monitored systems and to a lesser extent, when NightWatch is hosted on XP SP2. When NightWatch is hosted on XP SP2, you must go into the Firewall con- trol panel applet and configure NightWatch as an Exception Program. When NightWatch is monitoring XP SP2 systems, if you use any Windows Management Instrumentation based MOs (WMI Query, Win32 Process), you must enable remote administration in the firewall on the monitored XP system. You can do this in the Group Policy Object MMC snap-in, in the Windows Firewall policy section. You can also open a command box and enter the following command: netsh firewall set service type=remoteadmin mode=enable scope=all profile=all Further, if you use the TCP/UDP Services MO or the SNMP Query MO with an XP SP2 monitored system, you will have to configure the ports needed as port exceptions (opening them) on the monitored system. The RoomAlert 2 Monitored Object screen now allows the setting of the temperature & humidity correction amounts for each MO. If the setting for the MO is zero, the global corrections (if any) will be used. The RoomAlert 2 Monitored Object no longer supports daisy chaining RA2 boxes together. Only one box per MO. The RoomAlert 2 Monitored Object now supports the network enabled RA2 box. You can enter an IP address/name and port number on the RA2 screen and that address will be used to connect to the RA2 via a network con- nection instead of a COM port. The Monitored Objects List displayed on the Monitored Objects Tab of the Options screen can now be displayed as a Tree View. This tree view organized the MOs into trees by MO type, severity and system. This view can help manage large configurations. You can right click on MO groups to perform group enable/disable/delete. Copy is still one MO at a time. The Monitored Objects List on the Monitored Objects Tab now supports clicking anywhere on the MO list to select the MO. Multi-select with the control and shift keys is now allowed. You can right click to per- form enable/disable/delete on multiple MOs. Copy is still one MO at a time. The Status, Event Console and Mib Explorer screens are now resizeable. For those who use NightWatch in Service Mode, the removal of the configuration display on service pause has been a problem. This has necessitated stopping the service, making configuration changes, and then restarting the service. To address this, NightWatch has been modi- fied to be run as a desktop application at the same time the NightWatch service is running. When this happens, the desktop NightWatch detects the service NightWatch and enters Maintenance Mode. When in Maintenance Mode, the desktop NightWatch reads the configuration from the registry and will allow you to change it, all while the service continues to run. If you save the configuration, NightWatch will ask if you wish to restart the service so it will load the new configuration. This should help streamline configuration changes for service mode users. NightWatch now supports a formal way to manage multiple configurations. Using a new field on the Global Options tab, you can assign names to configurations, copy configurations and create new configurations. Then from the Main screen Settings pull down menu, you can select the con- figuration that will be loaded on the next start of NightWatch. See the help for a detailed discussion of this feature. NightWatch tracks total monitoring time (scan time) and total alarm time for each Monitored Object. This information is displayed on the Status screen and Web Status. Additionally, this information is used to calculate the % Downtime shown in these same locations. By default, these times are not saved when NightWatch shuts down. So this informa- tion is for the current execution of NighWatch only. You can now save this information at shutdown and reload it at start up. Then the mon- itoring and alarm time and % downtime displays are cumulative starting at the point this option is enabled. See the Options screen Logging tab for more information. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.2.4 August 23, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you have customized any Host Login scripts, you need to make the following changes to your scripts when they are run on 4.2 or later. Scripts will run slowly until these changes are made. Change: sg.trace -> sh.trace sg.createobject -> sh.createobject also, any objects created via sh.createobject should be released by setting the object to nothing, instead of calling sg.releaseobject. Fix bug in Processing Error alarms. Alarms caused by Processing Errors and delivered by broadcast message were incomplete, leaving off the error description. Removed errors logged when the alarm messages send by broadcast are truncated by the Windows operating system. Fixed Run Time Error in Web Status Manual Page function. Certain char- acter sequences entered into the message box on the Manual Page web page were not properly handled after they were encoded by the browser. Added special Registry keys to adjust for incorrect readings from the RoomAlert 2 monitoring device. The keys RA2TemperatureCorrection and RA2HumidityCorrection may be added to the Globals area. These keys can contain a numeric value (entered as a string) or negative numeric value which will be added to the values returned by RoomAlert 2 device before checking that value against the threshhold. Fixed a bug in the HostLogin MO that caused login passwords to not be stored correctly in the Registry. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.2.3 May 5, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed run time error when browsing directories in the Directory MO. Any error encountered while browsing resulted in the RTE instead of more graceful handling. Fixed SNMP MibExplorer to use the SNMP port entered on the SNMP Query MO screen instead of hardcoded port 161. Fixed several bugs in SNPP paging that prevented this paging from work- ing in all scenarios. Entry of the user name is no longer required if user name is not required by the target SNPP service provider. Fixed problems in Host Login script for AS/400 systems. The Room Alert 2 Monitored Object was designed to detect temperature and or humidity that rose above a defined threshold. It is now possible to configure this MO to detect temperature/humidity values that fall below a defined threshold. On the MO add/change screen, add the > char- acter after the temperature/humidity threshold value to cause alarms on actual temperature/humidity falling below the threshold. A single RA2 MO can only alarm on a value above or below the threshold, not both. To monitor both directions, two MOs are required. The Room Alert 2 MO now tracks the high and low temperature/humidity actual values recorded and reports this on the Status and Web Status displays. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.2.2 February 1, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modified the Web Page monitored Object to identify itself to the target web server as IE5 so that web pages that do browser validation are read correctly. Fixed some minor bugs on the MOs add/change screen. Fixed several minor bugs in the Room Alert 2 monitored object. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.2.1 January 12, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a variety of problems in the Out-of-Process Server Libary compo- nent (OPSLib.exe) added in 4.2 release. When running NightWatch in a remote VNC sesssion, you must add the reg- istry key shown here: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\ORL\VNCHooks\Application_Prefs\OPSLib.exe\ use_Defferal to 0 This will prevent run time errors at startup. Added new function to ScriptGlobals object available to scripts run by Task MOs. The match function will compare a string to patterh and will return TRUE if a match is found, false if not. Calling sequence is: boolval = sg.match(string, pattern) The format of the pattern string can be found in the on-line help under pattern matching in the topic index. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.2 October 1, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- With this release of NightWatch, significant changes have occurred in the design of this product. Please read these notes carefully and consider the impact of the changes on your use of NightWatch before you proceed with this update. Multi-Threading Previous NightWatch releases used multi-threading to keep the user interface responsive during the time NightWatch is scanning monitored objects for alarm events. This was fine for the early releases but as the number of features has grown the multi-threading technology has become untenable. In 4.2 the multi-threading design has been changed. The new form of MT is active at all times so the menu option to enable/disable MT has been removed. With this new design, a compromise has been found that has removed the increasing reliability problems of the old MT design and retained most of the scan speed and user interface responsiveness. This means (depending on your specific installation setup) the scan time and user interface may be slightly slower than with old MT turned on. How- ever it will be much faster than running with old MT turned off, and will give vastly improved reliability. For the most part, MOs remain unchanged. One area that does need your consideration is Task and Host Login MOs. One side effect of the new MT design is that scripts run slower than before. This will most likely mean that the timeout value on your Task and Host Login MOs will need to be increased. The exact impact of this varies with processor speed and load, so some users may see no problems and some may see timeouts if they don't increase the existing timeout values. Service Operation There are several major changes in Service Mode Operation. Prior to 4.2 if you paused NightWatch while running as a service the NightWatch main screen would appear and you could interact with that screen. Due to a variety of interconnected problems with service mode operation, this feature is no longer supported. With 4.2, if you pause the NightWatch service, the service will simply pause operation but no screen will appear. In this respect, NightWatch now functions the same as all other services. Services do not normally present any user interface and doing so was causing problems that could not be fixed. During Service Mode Operation, NightWatch must impersonate some user account in order to have appropriate security credentials. Prior to 4.2 the service installed with Local System as the default service logon user account and then NightWatch would assume (impersonate) the identity of the user account that is entered on Options Tab 2, Service Install area. This after start-up impersonation scheme worked for the most part but more and more problems came up with this scheme failing to provide the security context needed for newer NightWatch features, like WMI and logging via Instant Messaging. The solution in 4.2 drops impersonation after service start. Instead, it will install the service with the user account entered on Options Tab 2 as the default Logon user account for the service. By doing this, the security context of that user is successfully assumed by NightWatch for all functions when the serivce is started. For updating users who run NightWatch in Service Mode, after update you will need to go to Options Tab 2 and UNINSTALL as a service. Then you must enter a user in the boxes on the tab with appropriate priviledge to run the service and support the MOs and features you wish to use. Then click the Install as a Service button to install the NightWatch Service with that user as the default Service logon user. If you leave the user name blank and click Install as a Service, the Local System account will be used. Local System is adequate for some MOs but not others. Selecting an appropriate administrative user account is the better way to set up the NightWatch service. See the on-line help for more information on running NightWatch as a service. Processing errors now include identification of the Monitored Object that caused the processing error. Microsoft's forced upgrade of MSN Messenger users to version 5.0 or later, created major problems for our Messenger client logging feature. Our implementation of MSN Messenger logging was based on verion 4.7 of Messenger. That implementation was not compatible with Messenger 5.0 and later. This required a rewrite of our Messenger support. This new implementation is contained in the OPSLib.exe file and is not dependant on any specific Messenger version. In fact, Messenger not longer needs to be installed on our host system. The file MessengerTool.exe is now obsolete and can be removed. Added mew toolbar button the the System View screen that will show only the defined MO groups and the MOs they contain. It is now possble to customize the alarm cleared message text that is sent via email and paging with a registry key. If this is of interest, please contact tech support for details. All MOs that use COM ports and the Paging Tab of the Options screen now display a drop down list of all COM ports that exist on the host system instead of a fixed list of COM1-COM4. The ScriptGlobals object that supports Task MO scripts now exports a function called Shutdown. This function will shutdown the local or a remote system. A new script sample called Shutdown.txt is included in the Scripts\Samples directory. A new Monitored Object has been added that supports the Room Alert 2 environment monitoring hardware device. Paging can now be done over a network connection via the SNPP (Simple Network Paging Protocol) protcol to an SNPP capable paging provider. SNPP offers and alternative to paging via dial-up using the TAP paging protocol. TAP is being discontinued by some providers including ATT and in that case access to such paging providers is by email or SNPP only. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1.3 August 11, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in saving configuration to a disk file. On reload, any pass words read from the .cfg file were corrupted. You may now set the SNMP query port on the SNMP Query MO. Previously it was fixed at the standard value of 161. Being able to change the port allows NightWatch to support agents using a non-standard port. Fixed run time error when selecting paging groups on the Manual Paging screen. Fixed email return address to be the return address entered on the Options screen Email tab. Previously, the return address was always 'NightWatch@systemname'. Fixed run time error on the Service MO add/change screen. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1.2 June 2, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Modify Verizon paging .msg files. Note that VerizonPager.msg works with Verizon Wireless Messaging PAGERS. Verizon.msg works with Verizon cell phones. Verizon paging and cell phone messaging are handled by two very separate divisions. The list of dial up numbers has been updated for the two Verizon services. The FTP Get monitored object was extensively reworked to handle the IBM AS400 system correctly. Fixed bug in Event Log monitored object that caused a run time error if an event record contained more than 25 message substitution strings. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1.1 April 21, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fix DNS Monitored Object. This MO is included in the DataCenter Edition of NW but was incorrectly set up to be in the Enterprise Edition. Fix the System View screen to be rebuilt the next time it is opened after MOs have been added, deleted or modified. The Microsoft part of the Network Scan function would fail if there was a Termial Services server present on the network. This has been fixed. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.1 March 24, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new Monitored Object, Bandwidth. This MO monitors the network interface(s) on a target system and generates an alarm if traffic on an interface exceeds a user defined threshold. Added a new Monitored Object, Directory. This MO monitors a windows disk directory and can generate an alarm if the directory disk space or file count exceeds user defined thresholds. If can also alarm on any change to directory size or file count. This MO can also monitor a specific file for size or size change. Added a new Monitored Object, DialUp. This MO monitors a dialup modem line by dialing the line number and confirming that the modem connects and does so with a time limit. Also supports RAS via Windows Dial Up Networking. Added a new Alarm Notification option, Instant Messaging. This feature allows activity logging and alarm notifications to be sent to Instant Messaging clients. This feature uses the Microsoft MSN Messenger client version 4.6 or 4.7 on the system where NightWatch is installed. A mess- aging user is established with the MSN Messaging Service (or Exchange Messaging Service) for NightWatch. Messaging users add the NightWatch user to thier contact/buddy lists and will receive information from NightWatch when it is scanning. See the Help for more information. Fixed bug that could cause a run time error if running multi-threaded and a scan was stopped while scanning a TCP or UDP Service Monitored Object. The Log File MO has been modified to allow wild cards in the disk file name. When wild cards are present, the MO searches the target directory and opens the most recent file meeting the wild card spec. This file is examined and closed. This allows the MO to monitor a log file that may have ongoing iterations denoted by date/time or a sequence number in the file name. The MO selects that most recent interation of the file on each scan. The processing of file names without wildcards remains unchanged. The SNMP Query and Performance Counter Query MOs have been modified to allow individual Objects or Counters in the Query to be disabled. If an Object or Counter is disabled, it's value is still retrieved from the target system (so the value is available to the option script) but the value is not automatically evaluated by the MO. The Web Page MO has been enhanced to allow multi-level link checking. You can now specify on the MO how many levels of links will be checked. Level zero checks no links in the target page, which is the same as the MO has operated in the past. If the Link Level is set to 1, the page links (A html tag) in the target page are each retrieved. If set to 2, the Links on the Level 1 pages are each retrieved, and so on. Note that graphic file references and forms pages are always retrieved. The Host Process and Host Volume Monitored Objects have been enhanced to use SNMP as well as Telnet to retrieve process and volume data from host systems. This allows access to hosts without Telnet support. New host types added to the Host Type drop down list include VMS via Telnet and NetWare via SNMP. In the AlphaNumeric Script paging language, the W (write to log window) statement used to write text to the main Activity Log window if the Log Level was 2 or 3. The Log Level must now be 3 for W messages to appear in the Activity Log window. Fixed bug in Manual Paging screen that caused a run time error if a paging Group was selected as the target of a Manual Page. Added the ReBoot System and Delete Files pre-defined Task Monitored Objects. These Task MOs can be added from the New Monitored Object sel- ection screen. The ReBoot System Task executes a script that will re- start the target Windows system. The Delete Files Task will delete the specified fileset from a Windows directory. Added the NetWare Server Health check pre-defined SNMP Query Monitored Object. Fixed bug in SNMP Mib Explorer that caused the SNMP objects retrieved from some MIBs to not have the correct data type. Fixed a bug in the Disk Log File Viewer screen. Some users encountered run time errors and some cases where the Print button did not function. Fixed a bug in the FTP GET Monitored Object that caused it to not work correctly with VMS systems. The Licensing and copy protection mechanisims in NightWatch have been strengthened in this release. If you have problems with MOs that quit working, it may be because NightWatch was not correctly enforcing some of our licensing rules in the past and allowed use of MOs that are not part of the license you have purchased. The Install process had a bug which caused a new entry to be added to the Windows Add/Remove Programs list for each new version, instead of just updating the existing entry. This is because the version number was included in the Add/Remove entry name. This caused an accumulation of out of date entries in the Add/Remove list. Now, the Installer will add a single entry for this product and update it with each subsequent install. To remove the redundant entries, use RegEdit and find the key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall Delete any subkeys with this product name and a version number. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.0.3 January 14, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in search string processing that would cause a match to be found if the search string file contained a trailing blank line and the target string contained any spaces. Fixed Run Time Error in SNMP Mib Explorer. Mib Explorer would abort if the target Mib contained an object id value with a very large number in any of the object id component parts. Fixed bug in HostVolume MO. Extraneous output lines on host disk volume display output were not correctly ignored and fouled up the reading of volume information for the legitimate volumes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.0.2 December 16, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in Web Status. Display of activity log failed under some con- ditions. Added Windows XP System Health pre-defined Performance Counter MO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.0.1 December 2, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed bug in Performance Counter MO that caused a Run Time Error. Fixed bug in Host Volume MO that caused a Run Time Error. Fixed bug in Manual Page screen that caused a Run Time Error. Improved formatting of SNMP Trap messages when additional SNMP objects are sent as addendums to the trap message. Fixed the Web Page MO to correctly handle the BASE html tag. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 4.0.0 October 25, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NightWatch for NT has been renamed NightWatch. A side effect of this name change can cause problems when updating a previous release. When updating, NightWatch will try to locate the existing install directory and update that directory. If you uninstall the previous release first or change the install directory path for the new (any) install, file names stored in your configuration may no longer be correct. Up to now, if you uninstalled and installed fresh, the path name stayed the same (NightWatch for NT) and there was no problem. Now, if you uninstall and install fresh, the path name will be just NightWatch. It is not necess- ary to uninstall before an update, so updating your existing installa- tion is recomended. Be sure to watch the install process and see that the installer properly detects your existing install. If it does not, set the install directory manually to the existing directory. When installing 4.0.0, you may be prompted to insert the Microsoft Office CD. This is caused by a bug in a Microsoft component that is shared by NightWatch and MS Office. Insert the Office CD and continue. Added new Monitored Object, Host Process, which monitors processes on host systems, such as Unix, Linux, VMS, AS400, HP3000. This MO uses Telnet to connect to specified host systems and obtain a process list. This list is compared to a list of expected processes and an alarm is generated for any missing processes. This MO works in a manner similar to the Host Login MO, but is simpler to configure. Added new Monitored Object, Host Volume, which monitors disk volume free space on host systems, such as Unix, Linux, VMS. This MO uses Telnet to connect to specified host systems and obtain a disk volume list. Disk volume free space is extracted from this list and compared to preset threshholds. An alarm is generated when a disk's free space falls below it's threshhold. This MO works in a manner similar to the Host Login MO, but is simpler to configure. Added new Monitored Objects, Win 2000 System and Win XP System. These MOs monitor Windows 2000 and XP systems to see if they are up in the same manner as the exsting Windows NT System MO. Added new Monitored Object, UDP Services. This MO monitors UPD network services such as SNMP and generates an alarm if the services are not active. Note that TCP and UDP services are very similar in nature but use different protocols. Note: the UDP Services MO only works when NightWatch is running on Windows 2000 or XP. Added new Monitored Object, DNS Check. This MO monitors a Domain Name Service server to make sure the server is functioning and returning correct name to address mappings. Added a new Monitored Object, ePage. This MO monitors an email mailbox and processes each mail message as a Page request. Contact names are put in the message subject separated by semi-colons. The first 80 bytes of the message body is sent as the page text. This allows you to send pages by sending email to the mailbox that is being monitored. Added a new Monitored Object, Heart Beat. This MO generates an alarm on every scan, subject to Interval and Schedule settings. It can be connected to an appropriate Alarm object to perform notification that NightWatch is still up and running. Added a new Options Tab called Auto Add. This tab displays the list of known network objects as detected by the Ping, SNMP and Windows auto discovery scans (also known as Network Scans). From this list of network objects, you can select a group of objects and automatically create new Ping Monitored Objects for them. Added a new feature to aid in displaying large configurations. You can now organize monitored objects into Groups. You can then select these Groups for display on the Status screen and Web Status. On the new MO Groups tab of the Options screen, you can create arbitrary Groups and added MOs to these Groups. The Groups are then listed in the MO subset dropdown lists on the Status and Web Status displays. The Status Screen now has grid lines drawn to separate the rows and columns to make this screen easier to read. The Status Screen now displays the Monitored Object Type icons along with the object type text label. The Web Status display's list of Monitored Objects will now allow you to toggle between display of the MO Identifier and MO Description. You can click on the small white box next to the Identifier column header to switch between Idenitifer and Description. The Monitored Object Selection screen displayed when adding a new MO has been enlarged so more MO types can be seen without scrolling. You can also see the available MO types as a list. Scan time and alarm time for MOs is now tracked and allows for a new display of percent alarm time (down time) for each MO on the Status screen and Web Status display. This new display shows the percent of time an MO spends in alarm state versus the total time the MO has been monitored. This data will help identify problem network objects by highlighting those objects that spend excessive time in alarm state. The Scan Logging function now includes the information collected for the computation of the percent alarm time. There are new fields for total scan time and total alarm time. The log file also includes a new record for alarm end events with the elapsed time of the event. Users who employ the Scanlog log files should generate sample files with the column labels included to see the new format. The Web Status pages used to display 'N/A' in blank fields. Now, blank fields are just that, blank. The maximum message length for TAP paging protocol now defaults to 100 characters. This limit can be changed in a .msg script file with the T statement or you can change the default with a registry key. The Web Page MO now will insert http:// into the page URL if it is missing. The Web Page MO add/change screen has been updated to better display the mini web browser that allows you to verify the URL to be monitored. Fixed Disk Volume MO to handle 32 character volume labels correctly. Fixed Web Page MO to correct handle HTML tags with redundant attributes specified in the tag. Fixed Web Status internal web server bug that caused error 24056 to be intermittently displayed in the log window. Previously, the Mib Explorer screen would not display any MIB objects downloaded from the SNMP agent if the STOP button was clicked during the MIB walk (download). This did not support stopping the MIB walk early on very large MIBs. Now, if the STOP button is clicked, the SNMP objects downloaded to that point are displayed and can be selected. The Disk File MO can now monitor the size of files. The Search Strings function on various monitored objects now supports matching on strings not found. Search strings may be prefixed with the ! character to invert or not the result of the search string match to the target text supplied by the monitored object. See the online help for string searching. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.0.2 June 11, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Performance Counter Explorer would not display the counters correctly for a Windows XP target system. Fixed to allow for differences in the counter information returned by XP systems. Updated DLL files for SNMP related support from our SNMP tool vendor. The SNMP MIB Explorer would incorrectly report error 12015 when walking the MIB of a Windows 2000 system. The Explorer was fixed to correctly handle the end of MIB indication on W2K systems. The Email Ping and Email Check MOs would experience Run Time Errors if they encountered a processing error and the processing error notifica- tion was turned on and set to email a notification of the processing error. Fixed to correctly handle this case nested calls to the email routines. Expanded the Pre-Defined Monitored Objects list to include several new Performance Query definitions and Unix Host Logins. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.0.1 May 15, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed several formatting bugs on the System Console screen. Changed the font used for text to one that better displays on all OS and monitors. If after installing 3.0.1, if your System Console shows garbled or in- correctly justified text, click the reload toolbar button to refresh the display. Increased the initial size of the Select MO (MO Add) screen and this screen is now sizeable. Additionally, a list view (instead of icons) of the Monitored Objects to pick from is now available. The Email Ping MO has had some problems with Run Time Errors and these RTE would terminate NightWatch. This MO has been modified not to termi- nate on an RTE, but instead ending the scan of the MO and continuing with the next MO to be scanned. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 3.0.0 May 1, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Windows XP is now a supported host operating system along with Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000. Updated underlying libraries and components. Supported system software configuration is now Windows NT 4.0 SP6 or later, IE 5.5 or later. Modified the Email Ping MO to support pinging email relays. This means that the email ping message can now be submitted to a mail server and the ping message read from a different server. This allows a ping test in situations where mail is relayed or forwarded from the submission server to a different server for delivery. Fixed the AN script (paging) P command to allow any COM port to be specified. Was restricted to COM1 or COM2. Fix Task MO add/change screen. Was not retaining the Interval value. Fixed problems in Host Login MO scripts. Updated telnet control caused the scripts to fail when login errors occured. Updated all of the Host Login scripts to handle the changed behavior of the Telnet control. Fix Run Time Error caused by clicking on the System Console Screen before the systems were loaded and displayed. Fix error in System Console Screen that caused inconsistent sorting of systems on the screen. Modify audible alarm feature to support executing an exe/bat/cmd file along with sound files. This allows executing an external program to make noise or voice alarms. An example is voicing alarms with the ReadPlease application. Enter the following in the audible alarms box to use ReadPlease: "d:\Program Files\ReadPlease 2002\ReadPlease.exe" /state=1 /action=close /text= Improved error checking on the configuration import from file feature. Improvements and bug fixes to the SNMP Query and Trap MOs. Additional MIB files added for Novell servers. Improved the Manual Page screen and Web Status page to have enough room in the message text box to type and view a complete message up to the 180 character maximum. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.0.3 February 14, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed Run Time Error in Web Page MO caused by duplicate attributes on HTML tags in a web page. Fixed Run Time Error on NT Service MO Add/Change screen. Fixed Run Time Error that occurred during some Schedule object updates. Updated SNMP libraries. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.0.2 February 1, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Extensive update to Web Page MO to support target pages that use Frames to load additional pages creating the final view on a user's browser. Add an un-documented feature to the Web Page MO to support logging into a web site and downloading the page after the login page. If you are interested in this feature, contact tech support for details. Fixed bug in Disk File MO that could result in Run Time Error 13 when tracing and using Disk File MOs. Fixed a bug in the use of MAPI for Email Check and Email Ping MOs. When a login to the MAPI system failed, internal structures were not reset causing ALL subsequent MAPI logins to fail. Modified the MAPI message reading function for Email Check and Email Ping MOs to process unread messages only. Previously, all messages in the target mail box were processed. It is possible to restore the pro- cessing of all messages with a registry value. Contact tech support. When saving the configuration to either the registry or a disk file, the save confirmation message now states the target of the save, disk file or registry. Add explicit error messages when the MicroSoft XML Parser 3.0 cannot be invoked. MS XML is used for the SNMP MOs to handle MIB definitions and the configuration save to disk file feature. The MS XML Parser is not included in our install. You can download the free MS XML Parser version 3.0 from the MicroSoft web site. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 2.0 November 1, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new screen, the Network Event Console. This feature provides a global event history display. EventLog MOs, Syslog MOs, and SNMP Trap MOs all see every event that occurs, even if no alarm is generated. You can now enable logging of these raw events to the Network Event History and view this history with the Network Event Console. This provides a global, aggregated view of events from multiple systems and sources. Extensive filtering and sorting options are provided. See the on line help for more details. Added a new screen, the System Console. This screen provides a graphi- cal, system level view of your network and monitored objects. Systems with monitored objects defined for them or detected by network scans appear on the screen with appropriate highlighting for systems with alarms or processing errors in progress. You can display the MO list for systems and quickly see which MOs are in the alarm state. You can add/modify/delete/disable/suspend MOs as well as view detailed status information for MOs. This new screen simplifies viewing your monitored systems and quickly identifying which systems are having problems. It can assist in configuration by showing your systems and allowing you to click on a system to add or update MOs. See the on-line help for more information. Added support for Windows Management Instrumentation or WMI. WMI is the Win32 platform's implementation of the Web Based Enterprise Management standard (WBEM). WMI essentially functions in a manner similar to NT Performance Counters or SNMP Mib objects. There is a new monitored object called a WMI Query. This MO contains a list of WMI object prop- erties whose values are retrieved from a target system and compared to threshold values to detect alarm conditions. The MO uses the new WMI Object Explorer screen to allow the user to explore the WMI objects and properties on a system and select the items to be added to WMI Query MOs. This MOs model is very similar to the NT Perf Query MO. See the online help for more information. Extensive enhancement to the Web Status feature. The Web Status pages have been reformatted for improved appearance and readability. The new Event Console has been added to Web Status as well. Added new monitored object, Win32 Process. This MO will monitor a list of processes on a target system and alarm if a process is not running. Requires WMI 1.5 Core on both local and target system. Added new feature for event logging. You may now log the status of all or selected MOs after each scan. This information is a complete picture of MO state after the most recent scan of the MO. This data is written to a text file called SCANLOG in the install directory. This logging is intended to record MO status information long term and is retained when scanning is restarted. The data in the file is designed to be imported into spreadsheet and database programs for analysis purposes. Logging is configured on a new tab which appears on the Options screen. See the on-line help for more information. On the Options screen, the tab "More Globals" has been renamed to be "Globals 2" in anticipation of additional global options tabs to be added in the future. Normally, Monitored Object scanning is done in the order that the MOs were created. You can now set an option to scan in the objects in order of Severity. Severity scanning scans all Severity 0 MOs, then Severity 1 MOs and so on until Severity 9 is completed. Within a Severity level, the MOs are sorted by thier Description text. You may enable scanning by Severity on the Options screen, Globals 2 tab. The Email Options Tab now has a checkbox to enable alarm messages to be sent as the email subject in email alarm notifications. The default is to send a generic alarm announcement as the subject and the specific alarm message in the email body. The HostLogin and Task MOs now have a checkbox to allow scripts execu- ted by these MOs to display user interfaces. This means that the script can display message boxes or other user interface elements available in the scripting language. Normally scripts are not able to display user interface elements. This is due to the fact that if a script times out and user interface is allowed, the script engine automatically displays an error message box that the user must respond to in order to continue execution. This can easily hang Nightwatch if a user does not see and respond to the message box. If you enable the user interface and set a timeout, be aware of the possibility of a hang. Also note that script user interfaces are never allowed when NightWatch is run as a Service. The FtpGet MO now has a field where you may enter a timeout value to be applied to ftp communications with host systems. This should prevent hangs when host system ftp servers fail to respond in a timely manner. The Monitored Object Status screen has been enhanced to allow you to control the order of the columns of information displayed for each MO. See the on line help for details. The EmailCheck MO has been enhanced with two new features. First, you may enter a mail recpient address that will subset the mail messages on the mail server that the EmailCheck MO examines. This will help if the mail box being examined is used for multiple purposes. Second, this MO now supports Paging by Email. If you configure an EmailCheck MO to look at a mail box, and check the new Paging Mode box and enter a recipient in the Recipient box, the MO will expect mail messages to the recipient to contain a list of Contact names in the message subject (separated by semicolons). The first 80 bytes of the message body will be sent to the Contacts as identified by each Contact's defined paging options. Using this feature, you can send an email that will trigger paging delivery of a text message in that email. Before release 2.0, default alarm notification messages were generated by each Monitored Object when an alarm was detected. It was possible to completely replace the alarm default message with user defined text put in the Alarm Message Text field on each MO, but you could not see or modify the default format. Further, the second line of detailed alarm information that appears for some MOs was not controlable by the user at all. As of 2.0, all alarm messages are created from the content of the Alarm Message Text field on the MO screens. If the field has not been modified by the user, then it will contain an appropriate message template that will create the default message for the MO. So, you can now control the message format, including editing the default and you can also control the content of the second alarm message line. For more information on this topic, please consult the on-line help. Pager service phone numbers may now contain alpha characters. This will allow a phone number to entered as (example) 1-800-SKY-PAGE as well as 1-800-759-7243. Modified the TCP Services Monitored object to support more extensive testing of services. By default, the MO simply connects to the service. You can now attach a script file to a service that will be executed if the MO successfully connects to the service on the target system. The connected socket is passed to the script, so the script can communicate with the service and perform whatever testing of the service is needed. Two samples are included in the install in Scripts\Samples directory. TcpEchoCheck.txt is really just a sample and peforms a test of the echo service by sending data and reading back the echo. TcpDnsCheck.txt is an actual check of DNS service function. This script accepts a DNS name for a system and the expected IP address for that name. The script then performs an actual DNS name resolution with the target DNS server and checks that the returned IP address is the one expected. This scripting function adds a lot of power to TCP Service monitoring. Fixed licensing control problems that appear when the product is run on a system with multiple NIC cards. Fixed a bug in the FTPGET MO that could result in successful retrieval of files but failure to save them on the local disk. Fixed bug in some Monitored Objects that caused errors processing alarm schedules for the objects. This problem manifested itself as a skipping of rows on the notification schedule. This row 1 would be notified, but row 2 would skipped, row 3 notified, row 4 skipped and so on. Updated the Email Ping MO to support sending ping mail messages to SMTP servers that require authentication to submit mail. The user name and password used to login to the server and read the ping message are now also used to submit the message. The Host Login script "MPE Login.txt" had a bug in it and has been up- dated. If you use this script, you will need to integrate any changes you have made to your existing copy in the \Scripts directory into the new file in \Scripts\Samples and save the new script back to \Scripts. Using the old script with version 2.0 may result in hangs when running the script. You can now click the columns of the Contacts List tab on the Options screen to change the sort order of the Contacts List. The Manual Paging screen now supports sending messages to Groups. Modified the EventLog Monitored Object to support selection of event logs beyond the basic System, Security and Application logs. All Event logs available on a system are now listed for selection. Modified EventLog Monitored Object to correctly handle event records that use Parameter substitution or event Category message files. You can now assign an administrative password to Web Status. When this admin password is used, the Web Status user must logon with the admin user name and password to access any Web status function that modifies the operation of NightWatch. This includes starting/stopping scanning and clearing alarms. You can now export the configuration to a disk file. The Options pull down menu has a choice called "Export Configuration to file". This will save the current configuration to a disk file with the .cfg extension. The file is in XML format. This feature requires the Microsoft XML 3.0 parser (msxml3.dll) to be installed. You can obtain this parser from MS as a free download. This configuration file can be used to make a back up of your configuration. Importing a configuration file is supported but requires the assistance of tech support. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.5.3 May 22, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the MibExplorer screen that caused run time errors when run on a system with the German language locale set. Fixed a bug in the Web Page MO that caused the MO not to handle URLs with data included in the URL correctly. Fixed a bug in alarm notification processing. When running in multi- threaded mode, and the first alarm generated occurs during a quiet time period, the wait time between retrys of the notification process will be computed incorrectly, causing the retry to occur every second. It should be set to the Paging Delay value set on the Options screen. If the notification process is retrying every second, this can be quite distracting and scroll useful information off of the log screen... ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.5.2 February 2, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the NT Service MO introduced in 1.5.1 release. The NT Service MO would identify the Service to be monitored incorrectly. It appeared to select correctly on the add/change screen, but at scan time the MO would use an incorrect Service Name to actually connect to the Service. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.5.1 January 4, 2001 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- In the Alarm Text box on the Monitored Object add/change screens, you may now use the \n format code in the alarm text to generate a new line in the message delivered by broadcast, email, pager or to the NT event log. This allows for multi-line alarm messages to be sent. The \n will be replace by a space when the message is displayed on the log screen or if the message is used as the subject of a notification email. Fixed a bug in the Task MO. When running NT .exe or .cmd files as the task, handles were not closed at the end of the task. This "leak" of handles would consume resources until the system would have to be shut down. Fixed a problem where some screens and screen elements were not follow- ing the system control panel color selection. If you selected a color scheme other than the Windows Standard, the screens would not follow that setting and appeared incorrectly. Fixed a problem in the NT Performance Counter Explorer screen. The perf counter description text was not being displayed when running on Windows 2000. Fixed a problem in the NT Performance Counter MO. On Windows 2000, if a performance counter was selected on a perf counter query and the counter was found not to exist on the target system, a different error code was returned that on NT 4 and so this error was not handled corrrectly. The NT System Health pre-defined NT Performance Query MO has been split into two versions, one for NT 4 and one for Windows 2000. The counters selected for system health measurement are located in different places in the performance counter name space on W2K, so a different System Health MO is required for W2K. Existing Perf Counter Query MOs will need to be changed when you update from NT 4 to W2K. Modified the SNMP Trap MO to allow for multiple MOs to be defined. In a manner similar to the Syslog MO, you may create as many Trap MOs as you like, but each must be assigned a unique IP address or name that iden- tifies an SNMP Agent system or trap source. Traps from a specific Agent system will be handled by the MO with matching address/name. You may create one MO with no Agent address to be the default Trap MO. This MO will handle all traps not handled by an Agent specific Trap MO. Fixed several problems caused by non-english registry parameter values. This caused problems with Network scanning and NetWare server access on systems localized to non-english languages. Fixed a run time error that occured when the disk log file viewing screen was displayed, but disk logging was disabled. Fixed a bug in the Alarm object when using escalation schedules. If all 10 contacts were used on an escalation line, a run time error occurred. 9 contacts worked fine and now all 10 work correctly. Fixed a long time problem with the Event Log MO. Events would generate errors indicating that the event description text could not be found in the event source file. This was due to certain events that use a spec- ialized scheme for substituting parameter values into the event desc- ription text. We were not handling this scheme correctly resulting in the errors. Fixed several corner case run time errors in the Network scan code and in certain MOs. Fixed a problem in parameter expansion in alarm messages. Substitution parameters of the form [NAME] were not correctly expanded if NAME was in lower case. The parameter name can be upper or lower case. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.5 October 20, 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a new Monitored Object, Email Checker. This MO will read email messages on a mail server and examine the subject and/or body of the messages for user defined text strings and generate alarms or execute Tasks if strings are found. See the on-line help for details. Added a new Monitored Object, Email Ping. This MO will send a unique email message to a mail server and then try to read that message back from the server in a set amount of time. Used to monitor timely mail delivery. See the on-line help for details. Made improvements to the Web Status code and Web Status html pages to improve performance. Added Copy buttons to the Alarms and Contacts Options Tabs. The default TCP/IP port number for Web Status is now 1088 instead of 81. If you are currently using 81 (or any other port number), that port will continue to be used. The Ping MO now includes the description text in alarm messages along with the IP address for clearer labelling of Ping alarm messages. The Ping, Web Page and Email Ping MOs now maintain an average response time while scanning is in progress. This response time can be viewed on the Status screen under Object Details (right click on MO) or on the MO detail view of Web Status. Added an option to apply Global Quiet time to alarm notification by Email. When this option is checked on the Global Options screen, any Email alarm notification generated during Global Quiet Time will not be sent. Note, it will not be delivered after Global Quiet Time ends, as are paging notifications. Fixed the missing help for the Mib Explorer screen. Fixed the problem where the Mib Explorer would not work correctly when an IP address was used to identify an SNMP agent system instead of a system name. Name or IP address should work the same to identify the SNMP agent system on Mib Explorer and SNMP Query MO. The SNMP Mib Explorer screen now automatically starts the Mib Walking process when the Explorer screen is displayed. As the Mib Walk is the first action to be taken after this screen is displayed, it makes sense to have that action start automatically when the screen appears. The FTPGET MO will now allow the selection of the character used to separate the components of the file path on the target system. This allows this character to be set as appropriate for various host systems instead of the previous fixed "/". The character defaults to / and will be set automatically by the Ftp Explorer if the Explorer recognizes the target system type. The FTPGET MO has a fixed timeout value of 15 seconds. This value is not long enough for some ftp target systems. As a temporary fix, a new Registry key has been added to control the FTPGET timeout. The key is "Globals\FtpGetTimeOut" and the value is the number of seconds. The TASK MO has a timeout value that is applied to scripts to prevent runaway scripts. If a script times out, a message box is displayed (when running in desktop mode) and the user must respond to the message box before scanning can continue. This has resulted in "hangs" caused by message box wait. The message box can only be suppressed by disabl- ing all user interface access for the script. This has been done as the new default for script execution. If a timeout occurs processing will continue and the timeout is logged to the Log Window, but no message box appears. If a script needs to have a user interface, you can set a new Registry key to allow script user interface, but if you do, you will get the message box on script time outs. In this case, you can set the script timeout to a large value. To enable script user interface, set reg key "Globals\AllowScriptUI" to the string "true". The Task MO had a bug that prevented escalating Alarm schedules from working. This is fixed. The Schedule Object had an option labelled "One Time". This meant that the Monitored Object the Schedule was attached to would be scanned just one time after start of scanning. This option has been deemed to be of little use and based on user demand, this option has been changed to be "Once Per Day". This means that the MO will be scanned only once per day, subject to the other scheduling options. The once per day tracking is reset if scanning is stopped and restarted. The WebPage MO accesses web pages (URLs) directly or via proxy based on the logged on user's Windows Internet Settings (IE). If the user has a proxy defined in these settings, then the WebPage MO will use the proxy server. However, since the proxy settings are stored by individual user this has presented some problems. As a temporary solution, you can now specify a global proxy server name in a registry key. The WebPage MO now looks for the registry key "ProxyServer" in the Globals section. If a server name is set, WebPage MOs will access thier URLs via that proxy server. If a server name is not set, WebPage MOs will access thier URLs using the proxy set (if any) in Windows Internet Settings. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.4.3 May 10, 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in both the HostLogin MO and the Host Login scripts. Alarms generated by HostLogin MOs would not escalate or clear when the alarm condition ended. The scripts are responsible for clearing alarms but the scripts did not have the code to do this. The scripts have been updated to clear alarms. If you have modified scripts, you will need to integrate the changes to your custom scripts. Corrected several bugs in the WebPage MO. These bugs were fairly minor but a few customers have seen problems with the WebPage MO hanging when connecting to the web server. We have not been able to prove the bugs are the cause of the hangs, but they are fixed none the less. Corrected several bugs in the SNMPQuery and SNMPTrap MOs that prevented SNMP object IDs from being mapped to thier English names as defined in the SNMP MIBs. Also expanded the alarm message substitution variables available for the Trap MO. The formatted Trap message is now available to a Task script attached to the Trap MO. The EventLog MO now has additional substitution variables for the alarm message. The formatted EventLog record is now available to a Task script attached to the EventLog MO. The new feature in 1.4.2 that saves the network search results in a disk file for reuse, had a bug in it that would cause the reload of the disk file on startup to fail, if the comments returned about a system on the network contained quote characters. This has been fixed. The pager service phone number box on the Paging Options tab had a bug that would cause a Run Time Error if you opened the phone number drop down list, ran the cursor over the list and then clicked outside the list area. This has been fixed. The HostLogin MO script for HP3000 (MPE) system has been enhanced to support $STDLIST spoolfile scanning as one of it's host monitoring functions. See the script files MPE Login.txt and ScanStdlists.txt in the \Scripts\Samples directory. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.4.2 April 06, 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Changed the way screen fields are handled. When a screen field is empty and receives the focus, the field is NO longer hightlighted by changing the background to to an alternate color. The cursor is in the field but the background remains white. When a field that contains data receives the focus, the test is highlighted instead of changing the background. If you move the cursor or type, the highlight is removed so that you can selected data in the field and see the selection highlight. This scheme is much closer to the Microsoft standard and should make using the screen fields easier. Added a button to the Status screen to reset the Total Alarms and Total Pages Sent counters. The Paging Options Tab now allows you to use COM ports 3 and 4. Reformatted the Schedule Screen to try and make the Schedule function more clear. Please review the on-line help for the Schedule Screen for revised documentation of the Schedule object. Added a Clear button to the Schedule Screen. Clears all schedule fields and if you click OK while the schedule is blank, the schedule will be deleted. Add new scripting capability for string searching. In order to provide the most powerful and flexible string searching possible, you may now write a Visual Basic Script routine to perform string searching. On any MO that supports string searching you can enter a VB script function or name a disk file containing a VB script function that will be executed and passed the MO's string information, so the script can perform ex- tensive analysis of the string to determine if an alarm condition is present. See the on-line help for String Searching. The NT Performance Counter Query and SNMP Query Monitored Objects have been modified to function as Persistent type objects. Both of these MO were of the Discrete type. This change allows these objects to clear any alarms they have if all counters/objects being measured return to normal states after being in alarm state. As discrete objects, alarms would have to be manually cleared. The Failsafe Server MO was not saving any Interval value assigned. This has been fixed. Added the new Room Alert PLUS Monitored Object. This MO monitors the new Room Alert PLUS environmental sensor interface device. Corrected bugs in Room Alert and Failsafe Server MOs that could cause them to use incorrect COM port settings on the port used to communicate with these hardware devices. The results of network scans and TCP/IP & SNMP address auto discoverys are now saved and automatically loaded at any location you can select a system name or address. Buttons have been added to the same screens so you can request a rescan or rediscovery if your network has changed. Also, this function has been renamed network search instead of network scan to remove confusion with monitored object scans. Fixed a variety of minor bugs introduced in the 1.4 release. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.4.1 February 15, 2000 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Correct bugs in sharing of the com port between paging and monitored objects that use the com port. Correct bug in Event Log monitored object. Failed to detect errors on log record read under some conditions and continued to process the log record when no record had actually been read. Modified Task object to enclose the name of NT program or command file in quotes (if you do not) to allow for file names with embedded spaces. Corrected problems with Room Alert Monitored Objects handling of the com port when reading the RA box. The TCPService and NT System monitored objects were not saving the schedules assigned to them to the Registry, thereby losing schedules for these MOs when NightWatch was restarted. These MOs now save thier schedules correctly. The MO dependancy feature of the MO Schedule object was not working correctly in cases where MOs are copied to create new MOs. The source MO and copied MO would incorrectly share the schedule object and depen- dany list instead of each MO having a private schedule object. This has been corrected and every MO has it's own schedule object and depen- dancy list. Modified the refresh period of the Web Status page refresh function to be longer than the scan period. We were having problems with web status refreshes coming at the same time as the start of a new scan and this would slow down both the scan and the refresh. Increasing the refresh period to be somewhat longer than the scan interval reduces the problem. The SMTP mail control used to send SMTP mail alarm notifications was using too short a timeout and this caused problems with mail delivery. The timeout has been lengthened from 5 to 15 seconds and can be further controlled with a Registry key. The installer incorrectly registered the MSWINSCK.OCX control and this would cause runtime errors when using the TCPServices MO. The install has been corrected to install MSWINSCK.OCX properly. The NT System MO would occasionally encounter error 2114 and was unable to locate and format a system error message for this error. It has been determined that error 2114 indicates that the Server service is not running on the target NT System. Message text to this effect has been associated with this error so it is now reported as a problem with probing the NT system, which it is, instead of a message formatting problem. The HostLogn MO was not saving the Interval value if one was assigned. This has been corrected and the Interval value is retained. The NetWare Server MO has a new feature. If your NT system employs the NetWare Client32 application for NetWare connectivity, you can select to have an alarm generated if the target NetWare server is up, but has no connections available. By default, no connections is not reported as an error because we have confirmed the server is still up even if there are no connections available. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.4 December 17, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Syslog Monitored Object has been enhanced to allow multiple objects to be defined and associated with Syslog host systems. This means that a Syslog MO can now be identified with the name or address of a host system, and syslog messages will only be processed by that Syslog MO. One Syslog MO can be defined with no name or address to act as default MO. In this manner, different notification options can be defined for different Syslog MOs. Added a new Monitored Object, SNMP Query. This MO queries a network device that supports SNMP, for selected SNMP MIB variables and tests the values of the variables against predefined thresholds and generates alarms for variables that are outside of tolerance. Since many network devices support SNMP, this MO greatly extendes the monitoring reach of NightWatch. This MO includes an SNMP Explorer that allows you to peruse the MIB of a network device and select the varibles you wish to monitor interactively. See the on-line help for more information. Added a new Monitored Object, SNMP Trap. This MO is of the listener type and allows NightWatch to receive SNMP traps sent from network dev- ices. This enables NightWatch to record and generate alarms in response to network problems that generate SNMP traps. See the on-line help for more information. Added a new Monitored Object, TCP Services. This MO monitors the TCP Service(s) active on a selected system. TCP Services are processes that listening on various TCP ports on the target system. This new MO will connect with the defined services and verify that they are available. TCP Services are also known as TCP ports. This MO allows the user to select from a list of known services and also allows the user to add services to the list. See the on-line help for the TCP Services MO for more information. Added a new Monitored Object, Failsafe Server. This MO monitors the environmental sensor port of the FailSafe Server(tm) hardware device. The Failsafe Server is connected to a serial port on the NT system and provides several services, one of which is an interface to a variety of environmental sensors. NightWatch can monitor these sensors via the Failsafe Server MO. See the on-line help for more information. Added a new Monitored Object, Host Login. This MO logs onto a host sys- tem, optionally performs monitoring tasks and logs out. It is used to check the availability of host systems and perform some host monitoring tasks. This MO performs the login, logout and monitoring functions via VBScript scripts. As such, these scripts can be modified by the vendor or the user for customization purposes and to add new monitoring tasks. See the on-line help for more information and the sample login scripts in \Scripts\Samples. All Monitored Objects that are active in nature, that is, are scanning MOs, now have the Schedule Object as an option. This means that you can have greater control over when an MO is scanned. Each MO add/change screen now has a Schedule button you can click to set up a schedule for the MO. The Schedule Object has been enhanced to include a list of Dependant Monitored Objects. This means that a Monitored Object, can be made to be dependant on other Monitored Objects. That is to say, if MO-1 is dependant on MO-2, MO-1 will not be scanned if MO-2 has an alarm in progress. Scanning of MO-1 will resume when the alarm on MO-2 clears. See the on-line help for the Schedule Object for more information. MOs which use search strings for record or message content matching are now able to accept a list of search strings directly instead of using a search string file. When entering text in the Search Strings/File box on an MO, the text is examined for the pattern ?:\ in the first 3 chars of the text. If this pattern is matched, the text is assumed to be a disk file name. This file is expected to contain a list search strings as before. If the first 3 chars of the text in the box do not match the pattern, the text in the box is expected to be a list of search strings separated by semi-colons. The Ping MO has been updated to allow retries. You may specify the num- of times the MO will ping the target device before generating an alarm. You may cause the position and size of the Main window to be saved and then used to restore the same window position and size on next startup. To save the Main window size and location, add a Registry key to the Globals section called "SaveMainWindow" and set the value to "True". The Monitored Object List tab of the Options screen now allows you to copy an existing object to create a new Monitored Object. The old MO is cloned into a new MO and it's add/change screen is presented so you can customize the new MO. This same list can now sorted by any of the col- umns in the list. Click on the column title box to change the sort. You may now specify a dialing prefix on the Options Screen Paging tab. Any characters entered in this field will be substituted in dialing scripts for the [PREFIX] substitution keyword. Fixed a bug in Web Page MO that caused the MO not to retain a search string file name assigned to the MO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.3 July 6, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a Monitored object, "Task". The Task MO will execute a script, NT command file or program each time it is scanned. Execution can further be controlled by a Schedule which indicates when and how often a Task is executed no matter when and how many times it is scanned. Tasks can also be triggered by clock ticks independant of scans. Tasks can also be executed by Alarm objects allowing you to extend alarm processing. Alarm scripts have extensive access to NightWatch internal data items and functions. With this capability, you can use the Task object to create your own monitored objects. Given the functions available to scripts from the Windows Scripting Host Object Model (WSHOM.OCX) and Scripting Run Time (SCRRUN.DLL), Tasks are a very powerful addition to the capabilities of NightWatch. See the on-line help for a complete discussion of Task objects. See the \Scripts\Samples directory for sample scripts. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: You must have the Windows Scripting Host installed on your system to use Task objects. WSH is installed with IE 4.1 and NT 4.0 SP4. You can also download WSH from the MicroSoft web site. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- One of the new script functions available to Task objects is the ReBoot function. This function allows you to write a simple script to reboot the local system or a remote system. The Alarm object now supports repeating an alarm escalation schedule indefinately until the alarm condition is cleared. The repeat scheme varys for descrete or persistent monitored object types. See the help for Alarm objects. The NT Performance Counter Add/Change screen has been improved making the performance counter grid easier to view. The String Search capability employed on some monitored objects has been improved. To date, each line in a string search file contained one or more words of text. Each line was treated as a whole phrase and the target text was searched for the whole phrase. To give more flexi- bility in string searching, pattern matching is now supported. Existing search files will continue to function in the old manner. You may now specify a pattern match by enclosing the pattern string in quotes. Only one pattern per string file line. Pattern matching greatly improves the capability of string searching. See the on-line help for a detailed discussion of pattern matching in string searching. By default, when an alarm notification is emailed, the subject line of the email contains a generic announcement of an error notification and the details of the notification are in the email body. You may now set a registry key to cause the notification detail text to be used as the email subject line. The registry key is: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NightWatch\Globals\AlarmIsMailSubject Set the value of this key to a string of True. In any field were you can enter an e-mail recipient for alarm notifica- tion, you may now enter multiple e-mail recipients separating the mail addresses with a semi-colon. The alarm notification will be mailed to each recipient. The AlertScript W command is used to display text to the Activity Log window. The yellow "warning" icon was used for such messages. The blue "information" icon is now used for AlertScript W command activity log messages. The Status screen now displays the Last Alarm ID number assigned to monitored objects that have alarm notifications. This enables the use of the alarm ID number on numeric pages and the recipient of the page to determine the MO that originated the page. Improved the buttons used to control the Web Status functions on the Web Status web pages. Added the ability to subset the Monitored Object List display on Web status, in the same way you can subset the Status screen. When using security with Web Status, you can now disable that security checking for the Manual Page function of Web Status. This allows users to send manual pages without having access to the rest of Web Status if they don't know the user and password that secures Web Status. Added a new Monitored Object, Room Alert. The Room Alert MO monitors the Room Alert(tm) environmental monitoring product. Room Alert is a small, simple hardware device that interfaces commercially available environment sensors to the COM port of the NT system. This allows the Room Alert MO to monitor the Room Alert hardware via the COM port and report environmental problems such as overtemp, smoke, water (and much more) just like any other monitored object. See the on-line help for more details on the Room Alert product. Added string searching to Web Page monitored object. If a web page is downloaded without error, you can then search the page contents for one or more text strings, whose presense define an alarm condition. TCP/IP port number fields on the Options Tab are now edited for correct range, 1 to 32767. The Scan Now button and pull-down menu choice will run a one-time scan if not in scanning mode or will trigger the next scan if in scanning mode. When not in scanning mode and the one-time scan is requested, the scan will be performed in single-thread mode, even if multi-threading is enabled. This is to work around problems with multi-threading in one time scans. If scanning mode is in progress and the the Scan Now button is clicked, the next scan is started immediately and will be multi- threaded if multi-threading is enabled. Fixed a bug that caused corruption of the configuration stored in the registry when extensive add/delete of monitored objects was performed. Expanded the Predefined NT Performace Counter selection to include basic Performance Counter Query MOs for MS Exchange, MS SQL Server and MS Internet Information Server. These new predefined performance query objects are now visible on the Add Monitored Object Selection screen. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.2.4 May 3, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- When monitoring Event Logs on another NT system, event text would not be retrieved if the software application that generated an event log record was not also installed on the local system. Fixed to correctly retrieve event text from the remote application's message file. The IP address Auto Discovery would continue to run even after it's screen was closed, causing very slow execution of the user interface until the auto discovery completed. Fixed to stop auto discovery when the screen is closed. Fixed bug in NetWare Server MO that would intermittently report servers as down when they were really up. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ** SPECIAL NOTICE ** ----------------------------------------------------------------------- If you wish to use the Web Page Monitored object, the Wininet DLLs must be installed on your system. If you DO NOT have Internet Explorer 4.x installed, and you are on NT 4.0, execute the program WintDist.exe in the install directory, or if you are on 3.51, execute Wint351.exe. This will install the Wininet DLLs for use. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.2.3 March 12, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a bug in the Network scan function that autodiscovers the systems on the network accesible via Microsoft or Novell networking. The scan would fail on 1.2.2 due to a memory management problem. Fixed several small bugs in the Email notification Options Tab. Test mail can now be sent without saving the configuration and returning to the tab. Fixed a bug in the Ping Monitored Object that would cause the ping to fail if the hosts file name maintained internally is incorrect. The Contact screen now edits the .MSG file name for validity. Fixed several bugs in the Options screen that caused intermittent fail- ures when adding/deleteing Contacts and Alarms. Fixed a problem in the new Internal Processing error Alarm Object that would cause a loop if the alarm object employed had an error during alarm processing. Fixed a problem with the NT System Monitored Object. Due to security constraints in NT networks, this MO would sometimes fail with the error "Access Denied". The [PARM] substitution function now removes any exclamation point (!) characters in the data to be substituted. Exclamation points inserted into Alert Script paging files would cause the script to fail since the ! is the comment character in Alert Script. The [PHONE] substitution parameter now removes any special characters found in the phone number. This allows phone numbers to be entered in any format desired, such as (nnn) nnn-nnnn and the non-numeric charac- ters will be removed before dialing. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.2.2 February 23, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The NightWatch install incorrectly installed CALWIN32.DLL starting with release 1.1.7 and this may cause problems with other applications. This DLL is no longer part of the installation package. The NT Performance Counter Monitored Object has two new substitution parameters for use in alarm messages. [NAME] will substitute the perf counter name without it's object path. [COUNTERN] will substitute the name of the counter and the test and current values for the counter. [COUNTER] continues to substitute the full path of the counter along with the counter values. If you experience problems with the NT Performance Counter MO causing unexpected terminations on NT 4.0, you need to install Service Pack 4. SP4 corrects a number of issues affecting this MO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.2.1 February 5, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in the Alarm Object that caused a failure when an NT Service monitored object caused an alarm notification to occur. When doing test paging from the paging options tab and using a Message Server device, some subsitution parameters were not replaced with thier values. Now works as documented. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.2 January 22, 1999 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Release 1.2 is a major functionality upgrade for NightWatch for NT. **************************** NOTICE *********************************** When you install 1.2, you will be required to obtain a new License Key. When you run 1.2 for the first time after upgrade, be presented with a screen, which displays your system serial number and license informa- tion. Call, mail or fax that information and the corresponding License Key will be returned. When this screen is display, NightWatch will automatically become a 30 day demo. You must obtain a new license key in 30 days to avoid an interruption in NightWatch service. *********************************************************************** Added a "Scan Now " button to the tool bar. If scanning is in progress, this will cause the next scan to start now. If not scanning, a single scan is performed. Added progress display to the splash screen while SNT is loading it's configuration. Add an item to the File pull down menu to write a test record to the NT Application Event Log. This facilitates demoing the EventLog Moni- tored Object. The file selection dialog for MSG files (.MSG) and String Search files (.STR) now allows you to navigate from the Alerts or Search directories to the Samples directory below Alerts or Search. If you select a sample file and edit it, the file save dialog will be pointing to Alerts or Search and if you accept the this, the modified sample will be saved in Alerts or Search, not Samples. This makes it easy to customize the sample files and move them to the "production" directories. The Quiet Time maintenance form now has a Clear button to reset the QT object. Substitution parameters in message strings and MSG files may now be assigned a default value. Substitution parameters may have the form [PARMNAME] or [PARMNAME=value]. If the parameter is not substituted prior to use of the string or file record and a default has been speci- fied, the parameter will be replaced by the default value. Setting the default value as nothing [PARMNAME=] will remove the parameter. The Pager Phone Number box on the Paging Options Tab is now a drop down box with a selection of common pager serivces and thier phone numbers. You may select from the list or type in a number. When adding a new Monitored Object, the drop down list of object types has been replaced by a form showing icons for the various object types available. Single click on an icon for a more detailed description of the monitored object or double click to add a new object of that type. The NT Server Monitored Object has been renamed the NT System Monitored Object, as it can monitor both NT Server and Workstation systems. Added the P command to the Alert Script Alpha Numeric dialing function. This command sets dynamically modem port characteristics. See the Alert Script documentation in the on-line help for details. On the Device Test form of the Pager Options Tab, there is a new field called Message Text. Any text placed in this field will be substituted for any [ALARM] substitution parameter in the paging script file being tested. This allows easy testing of alpha numeric pagers. The Email Options Tab now has a Test button, which will send a test email message using the options configured. You may now specify the value "All" as a paging group on Alarm Notifi- cation Schedules. This will page all defined Contacts. Added the ability to send "manual" pages. This is invoked by a new tool bar button or via Web Status. It allows you to interactively send a page to any of the defined Contacts. Added a new Monitored Object, the NT Performance Query. This MO allows you to define a query, made up of one or more NT Performance Counters. During a scan, the query is executed against the selected NT system and the values of the defined counters are retrieved. The values are then checked and can generate alarms for values found to be out of the range you have defined. See the on-line help for details. The Paging Queue screen (Status screen) now shows the alarm message text that will be sent for each page request. The Paging Queue screen now allows you to select a page request by clicking on the object type field and pressing the DEL key. Active page requests cannot be deleted. The Status screen now supports detailed MO information display. You can click on an MO listed on the Status screen to select it and then right click to bring up the context menu. Click on Object Details to see a detailed display of all of the monitored object's attributes. Click anywhere on this display to return to the normal Status screen object list. The Web Status Monitored Object display now includes much more detail for each MO as a parallel to this addition to the Status screen. Extensive changes to the Web Status function. The information is now presented in a more sohpisticated format using HTML Frames. Web Status performance has been improved and several bugs fixed. This new format is now the default format, but the old format can still be used by adding /Status.htm to the URL you use to access Web Status. There is now an option to log or not log Web Status requests on the More Options Tab. Alarms no longer automatically clear when leaving the Status screen. Alarms must be cleared individually with the Status screen right click context menu. You can also clear all alarms by Stopping the scan. This leads to the definition of some new terms. MOs have an attribute of "alarm type". This alarm type is DESCRETE or PERSISTENT. Descrete alarm objects have alarms that are descrete or separate events. The NT Event Log or disk file scan are examples. Each alarm detected for these MOs, is not connected to any other. When an alarm is detected, the MO goes into the Alarm state, but each new alarm is processed and alarmed as just as the first. In this case, being in an alarm state really just serves as a highlight that the MO has reported an alarm. The alarm state of this MO is cleared manually or when scanning stops. PERSISTENT alarm objects enter the alarm state and stay there until the alarm condition clears or is manually cleared. NT systems and Netware Servers are examples of this. If an NT system goes down, and this is detected by the MO, the MO enters the alarm state and stays that way until the NT system comes back up (auto clear) or the alarm is cleared manually. Once in alarm state, no new alarms are possible with this type of object. See the on-line help for more information. Alarm Objects can now generate an "alarm" when the alarm state of an MO clears. This allows you to be paged when an alarm condition is cleared. The Disk File Scan MO watches the EOF (end of file) of the target disk file and if the eof of the file is found to drop below the current scan position in the file, the file is assumed to have been recreated, and the scan position will be reset to zero, causing the entire file to be scanned and a new file position established. The Disk File Scan MO normally scans forward from the ending file posi- tion set on the last scan of the file. You can now tell the MO to scan the entire file every time it is scaned. The NT Service MO now has an option to send an alarm when the service is found to be down, even if the restart of the service is successfull. This allows you know there was a problem with a service even if the service has been restarted. On the Global Options Tab you can now select an Alarm Object to be used to generate Alarms for internal errors encountered while scanning. This will allow paging when processing errors (not Alarms) occur. The Disk File Monitored Object now supports the use of the Control-Z character to mark the end of file in a disk file. This is a selectable option allowing the disk file MO support different disk file eof con- ventions. Due to the fact that the exclamation point character is used in paging files (.MSG) to denote comments, use of the ! character in alarm mess- ages or any other text items that can be substituted into paging files, causes paging to fail. NightWatch now removes all ! characters from paging file lines before processing them. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.7 October 26, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Disk File Monitored Object did not correctly handle disk files with embedded control-Z (end of file) characters. This problem caused run time errors. The Disk File MO has been modified to ignore control-Z characters. The size of the disk file determines the end of file. The 1.2 release will include support for using control-Z as the end of file marker. When running as a service, or logging to the NT event log, NightWatch did not create a certain Registry entry correctly on NT 3.51 and this caused NNT to report LoadLibrary errors whenever it encountered an eventlog record it had created. NightWatch did not recognize the Novell Client 32 for NT as a network provider and so could not detect NetWare servers when Client 32 is installed. NNT now supports Novell's Client 32 for NT as a network provider. The Web Page Monitored Object now handles secure pages using the SSL protocol (https://). Fixed a bug in the Web Page MO that did not handle relative URLs for images contained in a monitored web page. The FTP GET MO failed if no remote path was specified. It now allows a blank remote path and looks for the target file in the remote user's login directory. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.6 July 15, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The Disk File Scan monitored object normally holds the disk file being monitored open between scans. This is to reduce overhead. In some cases holding the file open interferes with other processing of the file. You may now set an option to have the disk file closed after each scan and reopened on the next scan. The scanning of the network to discover servers and clients has become a significant problem due to the amount of time it takes. The length of time of the network scan is driven by the number of systems on the net- work and how many of them are turned off when the network scan is done. Nightwatch has been modified to not perform a network scan until you select the drop-down button on an option field that shows a list of systems on the network. At that moment, if the system list is not already cached, the network scan will take place. Further, a dialog form now appears warning of the impending network scan and gives the option to continue or cancel the network scan. The setup process now creates a NightWatch for NT sub-menu on the NT Start Menu that contains shortcuts for running NightWatch in trace mode or License mode, displaying the help or release notes. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.5 June 18, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a problem with Message Server Polling. The first attempt to send the PollStar.msg file to the message server would cause an abort. The Search Strings file tab on the Options Screen would save new search string files to the Alerts directory instead of the Search directory. It now saves new files to the Search directory as expected. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.4 June 10, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Corrected a bug in the "Scan Objects Now" command. The command was not executed when in multi-threaded operation mode. Now works in single or multi-threaded mode. Fixed Web Page monitored object to report badly formed URLs as an error instead of just ignoring them with no indication of a problem. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.3 June 9, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a "Scan Objects Now" command to the File pull down menu. This new command allows the user to perform a one-time scan of the monitored objects when scanning is not started, or causes an immediate scan if scanning has been started. This feature should help with demo and setup testing and at sites who wish to use a long scan interval. This command will likely be added to the tool bar at a later time. Updated the Alert Script .MSG files in \Alerts\Samples. Added a new file to \Alerts\Samples, PAGERINF.TXT. This file contains the dial-up numbers for major Paging services in the USA and Europe. Created a new "Search" directory to hold Search String files. A Samples directory within Search holds sample search string files. Modifed the Search String file Browse/selection function to copy any search string files selected in \Search\Samples to \Search and select the file in the \Search directory. This preserves sample files and will protect user customization from being overwritten during an update. On the Alert Script R command, you may now use the ^x escape sequence to generate control characters in the modem input match strings. Corrected a bug in the Web Page monitored object that would cause an abort of NightWatch. The Web Page MO was not handling some URL formats correctly and Wininet.dll is not very tolerant of incorrectly formatted URLs! ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.2 June 5, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Added a sample string search file for use when scanning the log files from Legato Networker. The file is \Alerts\Samples\Legato.str. The documentation for Alert Script omitted an important detail. On the S command, you can use the escape sequence ^x to generate control char- acters. Thus, ^B generates a control-B in the output stream sent to the comm port. Add support for full TAP paging protocol to Alert Script. On the S com- mand of Alert Script, you can use the new escape command ~[ to generate a TAP checksum for the TAP data block that preceeds the ~[ on the S command. A TAP data block is defined as all characters between an STX and ETX (inclusive). The STX can be generated on the S command line with ^B and the ETX with ^C. Added a new sample .MSG file TAPFULL.MSG, that implements paging using the full TAP protocol. You can now have comments in search string (.STR) files. When an * or ! character is encountered on a line, everything after the * or ! will be treated as a comment. Fixed a problem that caused NightWatch to not completely shutdown when exited. The Paging Queue screen (accesible from the Status screen toolbar) now indicates when a page has not been performed due to being in either the global or a contact level quiet time. The design of the NightWatch install directory has paging files (.MSG) that are in use located in the Alerts directory. Sample .MSG files are in the Samples directory. Files in Samples will be overlayed during updates, hence placing in-use .MSG files in Alerts. In this way, any customizations made to .MSG files will not be lost during updates. The Paging Script browsing button on the Alarm and Contact object screens will allow you to select a .MSG file from the Samples directory, but it will automatically copy that .MSG file to the Alerts directory and select it for your use. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.1 May 27, 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ** SPECIAL NOTICE ** If you wish to use the Web Page Monitored object, Wininet.dll must be installed on your system. If you are on NT 4.0 and you DO NOT have Internet Explorer installed, just execute the program WintDist.exe in the install directory. If you are on 3.51 execute Wint351.exe in the install directory. This will install and configure Wininet.dll for use. ** SPECIAL NOTICE ** Multi-threaded operation was disabled for a short time with the 1.1.0 release. You may now resume multi-threaded operation. The Alert Script Samples directory now appears in the Alerts directory. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 1.1.0 May 1998 ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This is a major enhancement release. Enhancements are discussed here at a simple level of detail. For more information about enhancements please consult the on-line help. You may now use your own icons in place of the standard OK, info, Warn and Alarm message icons. The More Globals option tab allows you to browse and select an icon to be used for each message type. Several new .wav files have been added for audible alarms. All monitored objects have three new attributes you can set. They are: Interval - Sets an object specific scan interval. NightWatch still scans objects on the global interval but objects with an object level interval are not scanned until their interval time passes. Delay - Sets an amount of time that an alarm condition must persist before an alarm is generated. Alarm generated on next scan after delay time passes. Severity - Sets a numeric value 1-9, with 9 as lowest, that is used to indicate how severe an alarm on a object is. At this point this attribute is only used to sort the Status Screen monitored object display. It can be used to put the most important objects at the top of the list. When adding new monitored objects on the Monitored Objects Tab, you now select object types from a drop down list instead of individual buttons for each object type. The Status Screen has been extensively reworked. It now allows the list of monitored objects to be sorted by Severity as well as Object Type. You can subset the object list by status (OK, Alarm, Suspended) or by a specific object type (see EventLog objects only). You can also view the new Paging Queue Screen from a button on the Status Screen toolbar. The status screen auto-update is no longer based on time. The Status Screen will update when any object or the overall status changes. The various options are now selected from a tool bar. Paging is now handled by a Page Queue. Any alarm that generates a page now queues that page request in the Page Queue. Paging is now handled by a separate thread from the scanning thread, allowing paging to be processed asynchronously from scanning. This should improve per- formance. The Page queue allows greater flexibility and control over paging and supports page escalation (covered below). There is a new screen that displays the Page Queue, accessible from a tool bar button on the Status Screen. In all locations where substitution parms are used, the [TYPE] parm is now available. It expands to the object type description of the monitored object being processed. All screens have been modified to handle text fields in a more standard fashion. When tabbing to text field or selecting with the mouse, the cursor will be set to the end of any data present in the field. If you press backspace, it will delete the data. To modify the data, you must move the cursor in the field to the location to be modified. To add data to the field, you must press the right arrow once, before typing. Add phone number and pager id fields to the Paging Options Tab. These fields may be substituted in paging or message server scripts with the [PHONE] and [PAGERID] substitution parms. The Disk File Monitored Object has two new scanning options. Normally, if the disk file named for a Disk File Object is not found at scan time, this error is ignored. If the file appears, it is scanned. You may now cause an alarm to be generated if the file is not present. You may also cause an alarm to be generated if the file is found. This will allow alarms to be generated based on the presence or absense of the file, as well as on the content of the file when present. The Disk File Monitored Object used to validate the file name in the disk file field as it was typed. This caused some significant delays when a UNC name was typed. Validation is now separate from typing and is invoked by a button. After typing or browsing a file name, you can click the button to have the file name validated. Prior to 1.1, when running as a service, disk files on remote systems specified by mapped drives or UNC names could not be scanned. You can now scan disk files on other systems in Service Mode by specifying the file name as a UNC name (drive mapping is not supported). A UNC name has this format: \\system\path\file Note that you must set up the Serivce User Name and Password (on More Globals option tab) for this to work correctly. Setting up Service Mode operation is no longer done by running the NightWatch.exe program with -switches (servin.bat & servunin.bat). You can install/uninstall NightWatch for Service Mode operation on the More Globals option tab. You can also identify a system or Domain User that NightWatch will impersonate while in Service Mode. Impersonating a user solves some security problems for Service Mode programs. Setting up the user allows remote disk files to be scanned while in Service Mode. The user name selected should be a system administrator and needs to have the "Act as Part of the Operating System" and "Logon as a Batch Job" rights assigned. When the STOP button is clicked on the Main Screen, scanning stops and the page queue is cleared. Alarms in progress are not cleared, allowing the Status Screen to be used to view status as of the moment scanning stopped. When the START button is clicked all alarms are cleared before scanning begins. NightWatch now supports browser access to status information and control functions via NetScape or Internet Explorer. If browser status requests are enabled, NightWatch listens for HTTP requests from browsers and will display status information back to the browser. you can view global status information and a list of monitored objects and their status. More detailed information for each object can be viewed and you can view the current Activity Log. You can stop/start scanning, enable or disable paging, clear alarms, suspend/resume objects. This feature gives remote access to NightWatch status and control. The NT Service Monitored Object has a new option, Attempt Restart. If the service is not running and this option is enabled, the service will be restarted. If the restart is successful, no alarm is generated. If the restart fails, an alarm is generated. Note that to monitor NT Services on other systems, you must be logged on as a Domain user with Administrator privileges. You can monitor services on other systems in the Domain that you are logged on to. If running as a service, the Service User (see above) must be a Domain user with Administrator privilege. Added a new Monitored Object, Web Page. This object lets you check a web address (URL) on each scan and will generate an alarm if the web page fails to download or takes too long (you set a timeout). Added a new Monitored Object, FTP File Get. This is not a monitored object in the normal sense. This object performs a function for you on each scan, and that is to retreive disk file(s) from a remote system and place them in a local directory. This can be used to watch for SPIN files on a remote system and transfer them to the SPIN directory for processing. You can retreive disk log files from other systems and then scan them with the Disk File Monitored Object. Added a new Monitored Object, Syslog Server. This is not a monitored object in the normal sense. If you add the Syslog Server Object, it creates a Syslog server process that listens for Syslog messages from other systems. Syslog is a UNIX error handling and reporting system. Event messages generated on UNIX systems can be handled by the Syslog system on the UNIX machine. One capability of Syslog is to forward messages to another system. You can configure Syslog on UNIX systems (and other devices that support Syslog) to forward errors to the NT system on which NightWatch is running. If the Syslog Server Object is configured, it will receive the Syslog messages and process them. In this fashion, NightWatch can monitor events on non-windows systems that support Syslog. Quiet Times are now set by a special screen that shows a 7 x 24 grid representing all hours in a week. You can click on grid locations to set quiet time ranges. Quiet times can be set at the start of an hour or on the half hour. If you have global quiet time set, after you install 1.1, you must go to the Global Options Tab and reset your quiet time using the new screen. NightWatch uses an object model to describe it's environment. Monitored Objects represent the things on the network that are monitored. Alarm Objects define actions to be taken when a monitored object generates an alarm. NightWatch now supports Contact Objects. A Contact is simply a person that is to be notified on an alarm. A Contact can be notified by paging, e-mail or message broadcast. Contacts are setup on the new Contacts Tab on the Options Screen. The Alarm Object Screen has been modified to allow you to specify alarm attributes directly on the alarm object screen, as you have in the past, or by specifying a list of Contacts to notify. This list of Contacts is a grid that allows you to specify one or more individual Contacts or Contact groups, that will be notified on an alarm. Further, you can specify a different set of Contacts to be notified at each scan that an alarm persists through. This allows you to escalate alarm notification over time, to different people. This capability allows simple alarm notification or extensive alarm escalation schemes. See the on-line help for more details on this major enhancement to NightWatch. NightWatch now supports alpha numeric Paging via a modem. As before, NightWatch does paging by copying script files to the modem or message server. Modem scripts are simply modem commands. Alpha numeric Paging required the use of the message server, which uses a script language called Alert Script, to perform intelligent paging. NightWatch now supports Alert Script directly. Using Alert Script in the paging script files now allows you to perform alpha numeric paging with a normal modem. Alpha numeric paging supports all paging providers and protocols via it's paging scripts. It also allows information from NightWatch, such as alarm messages to be sent as part of a page. Use of substitution parms in paging scripts has been expanded. You may now substitute information about monitored objects, alarms and contacts into paging scripts. This allows scripts to send alarm message text in alpha numeric pages. It also allows the phone number and pager id to be substituted into a paging script from the Contact object being paged or from global defaults. This greatly enhances paging flexibility and supports alpha numeric paging. Corrected a problem in Event Log monitored object that caused it to not not report some event records on remote systems. On the configuration screens for event log, NT system and NT service monitored objects and several places on the Global option tabs, the drop-down boxes for selecting NT systems would only show systems on the local domain. This has been fixed and all NT systems on the network will appear in the boxes. When running NightWatch as a serivce, you can now specify StartUp Para- meters on the Service Control Manager screen. At this time, the only valid parameter to use is "trace". This will cause NightWatch service to start up with tracing turned on. -------------------------------------------------------------- 1.0.1 February 3, 1998 -------------------------------------------------------------- Fixed a problem in Event Log scanning where very complex event log records caused an index overflow. Modified the .MSG and string file edit boxes on the Options screen. These boxes would cause program error 62 when opening disk files that contain a control-d as an eof. The edit boxes now handle files with ctrl-d. Further modified these edit boxes to use a fixed font and not wrap lines. This should make editing these files easier. Changed the default Log Detail Level to zero instead of 3. Fixed a problem in the NT Service Monitored Object. Some Services refuse active status interrogation. The code did not allow for this and would incorrectly trigger an alarm on this type of Service. An example of this type of Service is the TCP/IP Service. The code now handles this case and correctly determines the status of this type of Service. Corrected errors in the on-line help. -------------------------------------------------------------- 1.0 January 5, 1998 -------------------------------------------------------------- First Production Release.