Web reports and email

[staham]

I know nothing about Windows, but have managed to set up the operational reporting in some kind of fashion. However, it doesn't work as I would like it to.

The webpages it mails are so huge that I would like to move them to a web server instead, and just send the URLs and a summary.

Is it possible somehow to make some automatic job in windows that sends the html-pages to a Unix machine, using for example scp or nfs?

I have to say that the operational reporting seems a bit sporadic. Sometimes it sends mails to client admins with information about the specific node (as we would like it to), but sometimes it seems to forget to send them.

Has anyone succeeded in making anything get mailed, except for the "daily report" and emails for missed or failed schedules?

 

[moon-buddy]

If you need to port Windows data into *NIX, use SAMBA. You can mount a shared (READ ONLY or READ/WRITE) Windows drive in *NIX environments, i.e., defined mount points.

I do this often.

I don't have any e-mail problems with Operational Reporting. Just make sure that the SMTP gateway in Windows is defined properly.

 

[staham]

UTF-16 encoded HTML

Thanks. I think I'll do something like that.

I now stumbled on another problem. The HTML that the Operational Report produces is in UTF-16. Is this something that is possible change in the settings somewhere? I just figured out that this is why the HTML emails it generates works so badly. Few email clients seem to handle UTF-16 as well as standard text files.
It's not like there are chinese signs in the reports, so that should not be necessary...

 

[moon-buddy]

It is strange since my Operational Reporting environment is standard at utf-8. Been like than since day 1 of install.

Which e-mail client are you using?

 

[staham]

It's Thunderbird. It usually displays HTML as well as standard text emails, but in TSMs emails, I have to open the HTML-file with firefox to view them.

I've changed to text-only instead, and will have the HTML-file moved to a web-server for viewing if more details are needed.

I get the same problem if I make it send the reports to my gmail.com address. There I have an attached file, *DailyReport.htm, and if I click on View, I get presented with a page that looks like this:

(Tried pasting the text) Or.. Well, those characters seem to not be liked by this forum as either.. It's full of y's with dots, and other strange chars.

 

[moon-buddy]

Not all e-mail clients displays html files well, and may not handle different UTF properly. Browsers like Firefox, IE, Netscape, etc. have a provision to view different UTF formats automatically.

If Firefox displays the html properly I believe the problem is with Thunderbird.

 

[staham]

But it seems silly to use utf-16 for something that doesn't requre it. It makes scripting and handling of the files more difficult. And doubling the file size as well.

I just made a perl script that converts from utf-16 to iso8859-1. Now the report files are around 5MB instead of 10MB. (Some of the reports were so large that they were not accepted by the email servers).

Script follows:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Encode;

my $s = "";

while (<>) {
$s .= $_;
}
print Encode::encode ("iso-8859-1", decode ("UTF-16LE", $s ) ) ;

 

[moon-buddy]

The only logic I could see by using UTF-16 is that TSM caters to multi-language support. I believe this is an option selected during installation. But don't quote me on this. It has been a while since I had done any Operational Reporting install.

Nice work around!

 

[tom_linv]

A simple answer

Have you thought about pruning your reports down to just the things you really need? The reporting tool reports on many things that you don't use on a daily basis. If you write mulitple simple reports the emails won't be so big and you can manage them better.

Tom

 

[staham]

The only logic I could see by using UTF-16 is that TSM caters to multi-language support. I believe this is an option selected during installation. But don't quote me on this. It has been a while since I had done any Operational Reporting install.

That might be where the problem is. I don't think I want to try re-installing it however, as all settings would probably be lost then.

It seems to work very nicely now that I converted the data.

Thanks everyone for your answers!