Watcher

The Interaction Watcher probes one or more web servers, and notifies you if any of them fails. It can be used for several purposes:

• The Watcher can verify availability of resources on servers, by probing these with regular intervals and send an email to one or more addresses whenever the server or resource fails.
• The Watcher can keep the connection from disconnecting by sending regular pings on the network. This is particularly useful if your server is on a modem connection or in other ways are plagued with disconnects when there are no network activity.
• The Watcher can ensure that the local web server is running properly, and restart if the server is unable to respond to a request.

The Watcher provides a dialog on the Windows dialog that are used to configure it to handle these and other situations:

Clicking the "Status" field of the watcher dialog will cause it to immediately verify the particular server and report the new status.

• To verify that a remote server is available, create a new item with the new button. Provide an existing URL for a resource on the server. Type in one or more email addresses to notify if the server fails or come up again.
• To keep your connection from disconnecting, provide the URL to for example the default page on a major site (e.g. "http://www.netscape.com/index.html"). Optionally, check the restart checkbox if you want the computer to restart if the connection fails.
• To ensure that a server on the same computer is working, provide the URL for the server, and check the restart button so the computer restarts whenever the server fails. Note that verifying a server on the same computer may cause locks when Interaction is a preprocessor, but this will soon be repaired.

Installing the Watcher Component

1. Download the Watcher archive.
2. Unstuff the archive (most browsers will do this for you).
3. Find the appropriate version of the component in the folder that best matches your version of Interaction.
4. Put the component file in the Components folder of Interaction
5. Restart Interaction to activate the component.