IT’s BEEN A LONG TIME

First off, I want to apologize for not putting anything up lately. I have been so busy I can’t see straight. The stats server is coming along. I will give you a quick run down of the Meta:

STAT SERVER:

Linux RedHat9

Apache 2.0.51 MAX

PHP 4.3.9

SAMBA

phpMyAdmin 2.6

Webmin 1.160

VSFTP

This is one sweet server. Not to mention that we can completely administer it from a browser on a remote machine. There is an insane amount of stuff going on. First, I wrote a script that grabs the username, machine name, time & date, lab ID, Login or OUT on a computer. This script was written in VBscript and we applied it to the lab machines with Active Directory. The great thing was that we didn’t have to apply it to an OU of users. I applied it to the OU’s associated with my labs and then enabled the looback option. This allows user options in AD to affect any user setting at the computer. When the script runs, it opens up a text file on a windows share and appends the information to the end of a text file. The Linux server is running SAMBA so we mounted the windows share on the Linux box. We then import the data into MySQL via PHP or a Cron job/Script (haven’t decided) into the MySQL database (Bofe’s decision). We then have a page that grabs the data out of the database and generates graphs real time such as “Total amount of people in the lab right now”, “Total Unique users for the Day/Month/Year”. This list goes on and on. You can pretty much do anything you want with the data. It also provides a nice bit of security knowing that I can figure out who was setting at a machine at any given time and for how long just by searching the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin. We have a few more decisions to make and some bugs to work out, but it appears that the final product is not to far away.