Roland Weigelt's  L a s t B o x S t a n d i ng

Summary: LastBoxStanding is a service that pings a configurable list of machines in your LAN to determine whether at least one of them is still running. If no machine responds, the service performs a custom action, e.g. a shutdown.

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Latest News

2005-07-29: What about 1.0 ?

Good question. Version 0.9.1 is running just fine on my server, shutting it safely down each night. As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it", so I'll keep things the way they are. Maybe when .NET 2.0 is final, I'll have an official 1.0 release. In the meantime, if you're a C# dev, you should take a look at my other hobby project, GhostDoc.

2005-02-15: Version 0.9.1

Ok, the new version is up for download.

2005-02-14: Gaah!

Unfortunately, a small issue with 0.9.0 was found. If you set the check interval on your server to say 5 minutes, (re)start the service and then switch off all other machines on the LAN, LastBoxStanding does not perform the shutdown (or any other action you have configured). This is because the service has to reach at least one of the configured clients once and – this is the problem – the first check is not performed when the service starts, but after the (timer) interval has elapsed. If at that time none of the machines can be reached, LastBoxStanding assumes that the server is running standalone (e.g. for maintenance) where you don’t want the automatic shutdown.

Even if this issue does not affect usage in “Real Life” that much, it’s a huge problem if people download LastBoxStanding and want to try it out. I’ll look into providing a fix this evening when I get back from work.

2005-02-13: Here we go...

So here's the little side project that I wrote for managing the server I run the source control and bugtracking applications for GhostDoc on. Version 0.9.0 is the first public release, earlier versions have been in use on my server for a couple of weeks. As I plan to concentrate on working on GhostDoc, I won't spend much time on extending LastBoxStanding, but nevertheless watch this space for bugfixes and updates -- and of course the 1.0.0 version ;-)