Disk Space Checker

March 9, 2005 3:12 AM

I am looking for a way to monitor the disk space remaining on several of our windows servers.

We have several DMZ machines that need credentials passing, so any solution needs to take this into acocunt.

I have attempted to script this, but I am being let down by the poor error checking mechanism within vbscript.

posted by viama to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Big Brother is your friend. You'll need to open port 1984 between the DMZ machines and the monitor server, in cisco speak, "access-list foo allow host dmz-1.your.dmz.net host monitor.your.inside.net 1984", repeat for dmz-2, etc.

The client runs local, so you don't need to pass credentials (or even run the client as a domain account.)
posted by eriko at 3:41 AM on March 9, 2005

There is a nice little freeware application called SpaceMonger that does a pretty nice graphical representation of your disk utilization. It does not have a lot of advanced features around notification etc. but it does work.
posted by purephase at 4:35 AM on March 9, 2005

I looked at big brother, but I won't be able to get approval for either the client install, or the firewall burns. We support several businesses here. Spacemonger isn't really what I'm after - I want to see the space remaining on several servers at once, preferably in a nice tabular report.
posted by viama at 5:16 AM on March 9, 2005

You'll have to poke holes in your firewall one way or another, if not to allow Big Brother than to allow SNMP packets or something similar.

My preference would be to run an SNMP agent (Net-SNMP is what I'm familiar with) and use software like MRTG to periodically query the agent and log the returned info.
posted by kableh at 6:47 AM on March 9, 2005

You could always try Solarwinds. It is similar to Big Brother, but a lot more robust (IMO). It's advertised as a Network Management product, but it's clients report on a much wider array of system resources. It has some pretty decent reporting capabilities as well.
posted by purephase at 7:28 AM on March 9, 2005

This isn't going to give you any nice reports, but you might be able to do something much easier than vbscript.

Go here and get standard unix command line utilities for DOS (should work under Windows, although I haven't tried this set). All you should need is a batch file with something like:
du -hs (for used space), or
df -h (for unused space)
and pipe it somewhere to be mailed off, or put onto a web page on the server, or sent via whatever means you have in place now.

On preview, the web page referenced wants money, but look around and there are plenty of free unix command line programs for DOS.
posted by bh at 10:21 AM on March 9, 2005

Free UNIX tools for Windows. Don't boot up without it! =)
posted by kableh at 10:35 AM on March 9, 2005

A similar question was asked earlier...whether or not this will work wrt DMZ machines is unknown to me, but the suggestion I made then was the freeware app FreeSpacePro.
posted by bachelor#3 at 11:27 AM on March 9, 2005

I developed a custom solution involving a couple perl scripts that monitors space remaining on the data partitions of 25 server located across the country (US). One script runs nightly on each server and adds an entry to a log file. The master script runs nightly on a central monitoring server. It fetches each log file (via FTP or SSH depending on site security restrictions), calculates changes in usage, and then generates an HTML file with bar graphs representing space used. It's not the most elegant solution, but it sure beats doing the work myself!

The actual page is on a private network, so here's a screenshot.

If you want, I can send you the scripts and help you set them up for your environment. E-mail me if interested.
posted by pmbuko at 1:17 PM on March 9, 2005

kableh: Great link, I have it installed all over the place. But from running systems in a number of corporate environments, the DLL is often a killer. Seriously. No, I don't know why.

I've had better luck with single commands and no dependencies. I used to keep all of my unix-like commands in one zip file, but unfortunately it isn't available to me right now.
posted by bh at 5:10 PM on March 9, 2005