I was wondering if there exists an add-on to monitor some servers/hosts in case one of them goes down, all done through simple interval (each 5" for example) pings.
I've found a forum fella that has already done something similar here, but it's in Alpha version and not installing in the actual RM (1.5 .v560) version.
Another example, Stephen Austin Network Monitor, fully functional and working add-on for Yahoo Widgets, which accomplishes that objective.
That thing I wrote should work fine in any version of Rainmeter. I'm not sure what you are running into, but if needed change the extension of the file from .rmskin to .zip, unzip it, and copy it to your \skins folder manually, restart Rainmeter and load it.
In any case, monitoring systems other than the one Rainmeter is running on is problematic. Since Rainmeter can't reach across the network to actually check hardware on a remote computer, there are limitations on what you can do and how to do it.
However, if you have some control over the remote computers, there is a way to get somewhere.
Setup a batch process of some kind (shell script, DOS batch file, python, VBS, name your poison, depending on the OS of the host) that does whatever testing you want (temperatures, status of server applications, hard drive space, whatever you like) and have the batch process redirect/write the results to a log file of some kind. I would recommend some kind of XML looking file, as that is the easiest to parse.
Run this batch in a crontab or scheduled task, every xx seconds/minutes as needed.
Then you can hit that file(s) with WebParser from the machine running Rainmeter, and easily parse the file to get results. If you can't get to the file, you know the server (or at lest the web server) is down. You can add in a Ping measure if you want to narrow the issue to web server / entire server / network.
If you have no control over the remote server, and can't set up some kind of "push" process, then it's probably not going to be possible with Rainmeter, other than the basics, "is the server there and can I talk to its web server".
