Using Content Verification on Public Websites to Track My Son’s Soccer Team Standings

May 21st, 2008 by Eric Chambers

If any of you have spent time on the phone with me here in the ScienceLogic Support department this spring you probably know that my son Max plays youth soccer here in Virginia…a lot. Can you believe that there are rankings of youth soccer teams at this level?

Well, it makes sense once you realize that the ranking is done by the company that sells the software that runs many tournaments. The software “phones home” the results so that there is a steady data stream of teams and scores. They’ve put together an algorithm and whereas there may be logical holes, it is a baseline and therefore you can measure.

Anyway, I saw the ASC Knights FC’s page and that they had 637 points from the algorithm. When I viewed the source of the page I could see the point total in plain text, so it was a good target. I needed to be sure that the page wasn’t redirecting or SSL or any other such thing, in other words, the URL that you use on the Content Verification policy needs to be the URL that will provide the string that you are looking for. EM7 can deal with SSL and proxies, but it takes more careful configuration.

I built the CV policy on a virtual device (didn’t want a production machine going red for a personal CV check):

And sure enough, just this morning, a couple of days after our heartbreaking loss in the semi-finals of the State Cup the CV check was red…the point value had changed. The team had gone up to 757 points and dropped from 2^nd to 3^rd in Virginia, but risen to 54^th in the country.

But there is a dark side to CV policies on public websites! Recently many machines in a development environment were checking the same site every five minutes, and those eagle eyes admins at Slashdot noticed. Suddenly no one at ScienceLogic could reach Slashdot, our source of snarky geek news had been cut off!

Naturally, we stopped the CV checks and explained the situation to CmndrTaco and all is well once again.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading.

Popularity: 28% [?]

May 21st, 2008