RasMon v1.11

Welcome to RasMon v1.1, A freeware application to monitor all of your Dial-Up Networking connections. There are numerous online timers already out on the Internet, so you may say why another one.

I have evaluated numerous online timers but none of them provided exactly what I wanted. Some of the problems were:

1. For such a simple requirement some of the program were overly complicated or had special requirements.
2. None of the programs out there were able to accurately take into account the many different costing rules being used by ISPs and telecom providers.
3. The types of reporting available in some programs were limited or non-existent.

What I wanted was a nice flexible program, small in size, unintrusive and easy to use. So with that in mind here is a list of RasMon features:

1. The size of RasMon.exe itself is just 29k and the code inside it has been designed in such a way to affect system performance as little as possible.
2. The program leaves all of the reporting and costing issues to an external program. This leaves RasMon to the job of monitoring connections and leaves all the complications of costing / reporting to more capable programs.
3. Instead of providing reporting, RasMon generates a simple CSV log file which can be easily imported into programs such as Microsoft Excel.
4. The program is simple to use. Just run it and forget about it, until you want to review your Internet usage.

Leaving the reporting up to a program such as Excel means that you are free to implement whatever reporting/costing you want using all the powerful functionality programs such as this provides.

The CSV log file RasMon generates is Rasmon.log (in the same directory as RasMon.exe) and is a simple text file which contains a record per line. The format of each record is as follows:

Name, Start Date, Start Time, Duration (HH:MM:SS), Device Type, Device Name.

The Device Type will normally be something like "Modem" while the Device Name will normally be the name of the modem used to connect through.

It is left up to you to decide when you want to delete / archive the data in the log file. RasMon which just continue to log to the same file. The program only opens the file when it wants to write a new record to it. This means that you can review the log file in any program while RasMon is running without any file sharing problems.

HISTORY:

V1.0 (5 July 1998)

• First public release.

V1.1 (26 July 1998)

• Updated to include the time in the tray tooltip text when connected.
• tray icon is changed to red when connected.

V1.11 (30 July 1998)

• v1.1 binary was built with VC 6.0 instead of VC 5 meaning that when the program would fail to load on a machine with a VC 5 MFC42.DLL.

INSTALLATION REQUIREMENTS:

• The program is for Win32 only.
• You must have the MFC 4.2 dlls installed. If you do not have these installed then go to the authors page at http://indigo.ie/~pjn for instructions on downloading.

USAGE:

• Just run the RasMon.exe. It will add a telephone icon to the task bar and will sit there quietly monitoring all your ras connections to the log file.
• Right clicking the icon in the tray will present a menu with two options. One is a simple about box while the other option will allow you to close the program. That's it.
• To bring up the help file (this file), Just press F1 while the about box is being displayed.
• To make sure it does not miss any connections, simply create a shortcut to "RasMon.exe" in your startup folder

CONTACTING THE AUTHOR

PJ Naughter
Email: pjn@indigo..ie
Web: http://indigo.ie/~pjn
30 July 1998