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[Editor's note: Share your NT discoveries, comments, experiences with products, problems, and solutions and reach out to other Windows NT Magazine readers (including Microsoft). Email your contributions (under 400 words) to Karen Forster at karen@winntmag.com. Please include your phone number. We will edit submissions for style, grammar, and length. If we print your letter, you'll get $100.]

I bought a Jaton Video Card to use on Windows NT Workstation 4.0. The back of the box says the card is compatible with NT 4.0, but after I installed the card and the driver, the video card didn't work.

I then consulted my NT hardware compatibility list and found that the Trident chip (which is part of the video board) I was using was one digit off from being compatible. When I borrowed a card that had the right Trident chip, I got my video up and running. The chip in question was a Trident Providia 9685; the one that works is Trident Providia 9680.

—Gordon Bartrem
bart@ic.net

Use SMS to Centralize NT Event Monitoring
If you've installed the SMS client on your Windows NT servers, you can use SMS to monitor significant events across NT servers and workstations and report those events to a dynamic Web page. This Web page lets you quickly and easily keep track of all major server events. You can set up this monitoring and reporting system in four steps:

  1. Configure Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) on each SMS client that you want to monitor. Open Network in the Control Panel and install SNMP as a service. Open the properties for SNMP. Under Traps, enter SMS as the community name and add the SMS server IP address or NetBIOS name as the Trap Destination. Stop and then restart the SNMP service.
  2. Configure the SNMP Traps. In the Sites window in SMS Administrator, select the SMS client that you just installed SNMP on. Double-click to open Personal Computer Properties, and click the Windows NT Administrative icon. Select Event to Trap Translator. Click Custom, then Edit to open a dialog box that lists the NT Events you can monitor on that machine. After you select those events you want to monitor, click OK to save the configuration.
  3. Enable SNMP trap filtering. In SMS Administrator, open Site Properties and click the SNMP Traps icon. To add an SNMP trap filter, select Create and fill in the Description field. Click OK to configure SMS so that it starts looking for SNMP traps. Click OK again to update the SMS site. SMS will start monitoring NT event traps and reporting them to the SNMP Traps window in SMS Administrator.
  4. Run a SQL script to generate the Web page. SMS stores all trap information in the SNMP_Traps table in the SMS database. You can use SQL Server's ISQL/w tool to generate a script to dump this information to a Web page. You can even generate multiple Web pages by creating multiple scripts that filter different types of events or that filter events from different servers.

Listing 1 contains a script that uses a template HTML file (dbresult.htm) to dump all event information to the Web page snmp.htm. This script updates the table in the Web page every 4 minutes. The template file can be any style or format, as long as you include '<%insert_data_here%>' somewhere in the template as a WebBot. This field is where the SQL script creates the SNMP table.

After you have created your script, open the ISQL/w tool. In the Query window, input the script and click the green arrow to run it. After a few seconds, look in the Results window. If you receive the message Did not return any data and did not return any rows, the script executed successfully.

You can find more information about this procedure in sp_makewebtask in SQL Server's online documentation. However, here are two tips. First, if you're generating multiple Web pages, their directory path must be on the same server. Make sure that your Web server includes this path as a virtual directory to enable browsing. Second, in the SNMP Events window in SMS Administrator, regularly delete all events that are, say, a day old to keep the table small. This task will be the only regular maintenance required.

—George Rose
george.rose@digital.com

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CORRECTIONS TO THIS ARTICLE:
Listing 2 in Reader to Reader: "Don't Let Old Files Lie" contained the following incorrect statement: set SHORTDATE=%DATE: 12,2%%DATE: 7,2% The correct syntax is set SHORTDATE=%DATE:~12,2%%DATE:~7,2%



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Reader Comments

I read the short article in May’s Reader to Reader about the use of a Jaton Video Card with a Trident 9685 chipset. The article stated that the card and driver set are not Windows NT compatible. Although the chipset is not listed on Microsoft’s Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), I have successfully used this card on several NT 4.0 systems during the past few months. Many products on the market that Microsoft has not tested and certified will work with NT 4.0 (e.g., the Diamond Viper 330 PCI video card on the machine I’m using to write this letter). The only warning in using untested hardware is that you might run into problems that force you to be more savvy than the average person to get the hardware to work successfully. Supplying a third-party driver set for NT but not having the card tested is a classic sign of this type of product. I think the magazine is remiss to print items without doing appropriate research. A lot of people (especially home hobbyists) believe everything they read and consider themselves extremely savvy in areas like hardware setup when they really aren’t.<br> --John Luce<br><br>

<i>Thank you for your letter. We appreciate readers who set the record straight or fill in the gaps to provide a complete picture. We research everything that appears in the magazine. In the Reader to Reader article you refer to, the reader was relating his particular experience with a video card. As you point out, users might run into problems, and this user did.<br> --Karen Forster</i>

John Luce- August 11, 1999