Setting up Snapshot Email Notification

  1. Download Blat for Windows (full). You must unzip it to c:\ for the batch file to work. Rename c:\blat250 (or whatever version it is) to c:\blat. If you aren't running Windows XP or later, you will need FreeZip to do this.
  2. Bring up a command prompt. Type the following :
    cd \blat\full
    And then :
    blat -install <SMTP server> <email address>
    Substitute the SMTP mail server for <SMTP server> and someone's email address for <email address>.
    e.g. blat -install webmail.halsys.com gthorne@halsys.com
    Close the command prompt.
  3. Create the scheduled task in Scheduled Tasks for the snapshot. Make sure the username the task runs under has permissions to access the file. The snapshot must start before midnight for the monitoring to work correctly.
  4. Open Notepad and create a new snapshotnotifier.bat file in the c:\batch folder.
  5. Put the following line in the file : (change the subject and from address to the appropriate settings for the customer)
    c:\blat\full\blat.exe "c:\backup\snapshotlog.txt" -subject "PDSERVER Snapshot Notification" -f gthorne@customer.com -to backup@xxxhalsys.com -log c:\batch\snapshotnotify.log
    Save and exit.
  6. Add a scheduled task that runs c:\batch\snapshotnotifier.bat in the morning after the backup.
  7. To test the notification, run the scheduled task and see if you receive an email message. If you don't, start Notepad and open the c:\batch\snapshothandler.log file to see if blat logged any errors.

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This page last modified on July 24, 2007 by Gary Thorne