Happy Holidays to Our Customers from Metadot

We've almost reached the end of 2011 and while it feels like the year flew by way too fast, we're excited to ring in 2012. The Metadot team, the people behind Mojo Helpdesk, Das Keyboard, Montastic, and typrX, thanks you for your continuous support. We wish y'all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Enjoy this video of an Angry Birds Christmas Light setup:

(Cross-posted from the Metadot blog.)

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Montastic Widget for Windows 7 contributed

We are thrilled to announce that Pål Andreassen has developed a new Windows sidebar widget for Montastic, making it even easier for Montastic users to keep an eye on their servers from their desktops.

We also have Montastic widgets for Mac dashboard and Yahoo available.

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Montastic DNS glitch fixed: do not use OpenDNS

We fixed a DNS issue that caused non-existent domains to resolve. This happened when "someone" at Metadot reconfigured one of our DNS servers to use OpenDNS as a forwarder. To our surprise Montastic started to alert us of a non-existent domain name being "up and running." This happened because OpenDNS intercepts all unresolved requests and returns the IP of their server instead of nothing. This violates the DNS protocol.

Why does OpenDNS do this?

To make money. From a practical standpoint, web users misspelling a URL will end up seeing an OpenDNS search page filled with advertising. OpenDNS has contracts with major search engine providers to do this.

Why is this bad?

Resolving non-existing domain names is wrong because it breaks the domain name protocol which is a standard used by hundreds of millions of systems.

On the Internet, network standards must be followed just as driving rules are on the road: most accidents occur when rules are violated.

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Add Notes to Your Servers

We implemented a feature requested by many users: the info field. You can now add some notes to your monitored URL. For example you can write a special reboot procedure, or specify the webmaster contact information.

As usual, contribute your suggestions via our website: www.montastic.com.

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Montastic Update: HTTP Authentication and More

We implemented few tweaks to improve reliability of our web site monitoring service and also added one new feature: HTTP Authentication. Montastic users can now monitor their protected pages by embedding credentials in the monitoring URL as shown here:

• http://username:password@mysite.com/protected_page/

This also works with HTTPS and port numbers. Here is another example:

• https://username:password@mysite.com:8080/protected_page/

One feature that was also requested is to show the pricing from the front page and not bury it in a deep place inside the application: It's done, it is now accessible from the front page.

New to Montastic and want to monitor your websites? Give it a spin at www.montastic.com.

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Montastic Monitors Your Sites Every 5 Minutes

We have been working on our Montastic Website Monitoring application for a while now. We rewrote a lot of the backend to allow faster monitoring intervals and to prepare for future new functionality.  As a result, Montastic has now paying plans with advanced capabilities.

It allows now to check your sites from once a day down to every 5 minutes. If your site is down, you get alerted by email.

Credit card payments are managed by Google Checkout which was easy to implement with Ruby On Rails. It makes the payment process very painless, reliable and secure.


We also added the ability turn monitoring off on a individual server basis. Here is the new color coding as depicted above:

• Green => server is OK
• Red => server is unreachable
• Blue => monitoring is disabled

Check it out at www.montastic.com. You can use the free plan to monitor few servers.

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New: Montastic Mac Widget

Thanks to Jim Menard, Montastic now have its Apple Mac OS X widget.

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Montastic upgrade

We have been busy upgrading our monitoring service. Due to the success of our free monitoring service, we had to do some changes the core of our application so we can handle the growing load. We had some downtime but the result is worth it.

Furthermore, we are happy to release these new features:

• Yahoo widget:
• so you can keep an eye on your servers while doing other things
  
• Capability to add several alert notification email addresses
• so you can get them on your pager or cell phone
  
• opt-in / opt-out newsletter:
• so you can subscribe to our low traffic email newsletter (see your profile) so next time we upgrade you know about it
  

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