Dev

The Dev section of my site is where I publish developer articles and other geekery.

Machine Info Service

I'm currently work on a small app that provides basic machine info via an asp.net webservice, in much the same way that phpinfo works. We needed a quick and simple way to check the status of our servers at work that would scale as we added more. The application would also need to run on a variety of platforms and conditions, a webservice seemed like the most flexible option. Adding the service to any .net application is nice and simple and you can then pull remote information off any server with the service installed. Just a few simple classes contain most of the server information. Currently the service splits requests into logically seperate chunks (machine info, drive info etc), this should reduce any load on the server as client machines will only request the information they require. However I will write a fetchall operation so that apps wishing to display all the information only have one roundtrip. I plan to include, memory usage, hdd usage, and the event log in the first version of the application. While the application is quite small is also quite extensible so others should be able to add additional information as they require.