Martinet is a monitoring & reporting program written by J.B. Nicholson. The target audience for Martinet are novice to mid-level IT professionals.
For a copy, installation assistance, and usage assistance please contact Martinet support. The program is under active development and it's likely that you'll need assistance to install Martinet.
Martinet prepares and sends a notice listing which services (AD objects, TLS/SSL certificates, fileshare folders, print queues, and more) do not conform to expected requirements. See an example configuration.
Martinet does not modify any resource that it examines; if you have Martinet examine your live DNS records, file share permissions, file share folder permissions, AD objects, or anything else Martinet can look at, nothing will change. Martinet takes steps to ensure that it cannot modify anything in your environment. Martinet lacks code which can modify anything. One can further ensure that Martinet is incapable of modifying resources by running Martinet with a service account which has no permission to modify anything.
Martinet has no code to track usage — no telemetry, no spyware — and the only reports Martinet generates go to email accounts that you specify.
Martinet uses a configuration file to describe which email account to contact, the subject to use in said emails, and how to identify what is properly configured. Martinet examines the listed configuration details and reports whatever differences it finds between how you said things ought to be versus how things are actually set up.
Why should IT professionals want to use Martinet?
- Quickly identify problems — Martinet helped identify a permissions problem on a new folder. A unit hired a new person who was due to arrive in the unit and the unit's IT staff needed to add a folder for the newly-hired user. An IT professional added the new folder to the unit's SMB fileshare but accidentally granted the new user read/write permission to all of the root-level folders on the unit's fileshare instead of granting proper permissions on only the new-hire's folder. The next Martinet report listed the erroneous permissions and the problem was easy to revert well before the new user started their job.
- Write actionable IT documentation — Nothing substitutes for proper IT documentation with clearly-described workflow steps and rationales. But Martinet can help IT pros act on plain-language descriptions of how things ought to be set up. This makes Martinet both practical and a clear description of the appropriate setup.
Martinet's goals
- Be easy to use — Martinet uses a custom domain specific language so that the learning curve is low.
- Be safe to use — Martinet has no code to modify anything it inspects and, when properly configured, Martinet runs under an account which lacks permission to change anything it inspects.
- Require no programming skill — IT professionals specify what to look for, not the steps needed to do the work.
- Deliver feedback via email, a time-honored and well-understood communication system.
- Use commonly-available resources — Due to the University's Microsoft contract where we get currently-supported versions of Microsoft Windows, a lot of colleges, units, and projects deploy Microsoft Windows. As a result, University IT pros often understand Microsoft Windows to a degree more than they claim to understand any other operating system (MacOS, GNU/Linux, etc.) and units hire IT pros for their Windows expertise.
- Require few resources — Martinet doesn't use a lot of memory when it runs and the IT pro in charge decides how often Martinet runs.