DNS 323 Windows 7/ Vista Gadget

Monday October 06 2008 13:22

Although you can look at the DNS 323 as a standard windows drive, in practice you probably need a bit more information about what it's doing. You can get that from the built-in web pages of course, but it's a bit of a pain to open the various pages if you just want to check that the thing's actually still alive or not. I run my box in a different building, so this is something I need to check on reasonably regularly.

Hence we have...

A Windows 7/ Vista (they are actually pretty much the same despite what the jurnos think) Gadget

I just wanted a little thing on my desktop which tells me that everything's ok, and a button to restart it and maybe one to shut it down. I'm sure there's probably a trivial way to do this, but it was raining so I thought I'd do it the hard way. Wget is good for this kind of thing, but I wanted a continually updating "monitor" as well as a few control buttons, so instead I wrote a little Windows Gadget. If you don't know what these are then you're too clever for all this, so why are you still reading?

Anyway, here it is....

Version 1.004 (1.06 firmware onwards - tested on 1.06, 1.07 and 1.08)

NasMonitor1.004.gadget

Since I moved the settings to a directory "outside" of the gadget itself, upgrades are easy. The downside is that it's no longer possible to run multiple NAS monitors on a single machine without some hacking. However Devin Rawlek has kindly built an installer which will install the gadget as many times as you need (well, up to 5, which is enough NASes for most). You can download the latest multi-NAS installer from Devin's site here.

Note that for 1.08 you need to set the timeout value to 10000. The default of 3000 will cause timeouts (see comments below).

Version 0.999 (1.05 firmware only)

NasMonitor0.999.gadget

Tested on Vista only.

Features

Buttons

refresh (there's also a configurable background refresh timer)
restart
shut down

Settings

Settings for all the stuff I think needs to be a setting.
Auto update stuff.

Limitations/ other stuff

It's table-driven so it's pretty easy to add other commands - you just need to know the url and the format of the output. Then add an entry into the state-table for the command, with a reference to the formatter to parse the output from it.
Built for what I have - a single Disk NAS (no RAID stuff). Also works with two disk I'm told.
Security fixes in firmware 1.06 reduce the data available versus firmware 1.05.

Pages

status: usage and temperature graphs, configurable colouring, uptime. It temperature or space hit orange or red this pane is forced to the front.
net : not much use as this stuff does not change. (1.05 firmware version only)
os: garbage from *nix. (1.05 firmware version only)
clients: client IP address lists (1.05 firmware version only)
enabled servers: flags for the various servers enabled or disabled on the NAS

Tags: vista, dns-323 nas, gadget, javascript, ch3snas, windows 7 Categories: Technical

comments(46)

Comments

Thank you very much and very good job ^_^

bobyy

11:15 October 20 2008 #

Thx! Nice gadget.
Works great on my CH3SNAS with two disks in it.

dude

09:23 October 21 2008 #

Any plans to make one for the DNS 343 ?

tukibird

17:52 October 22 2008 #

What's a DNS 343?
Unless there's a test box somewhere on the internet I can access to check the commands/ response, it's impossible for me to do. With the CH3SNAS there were only a few differences, and RunaR helpfully provided me with the html for the different bits. If you're keen, and you think it's likely to be similar, then mail me and we can have a go at it.

philw

18:34 October 22 2008 #

hehhehe sry it's a Dlink DNS 343 (4 HDD) model

tukibird

12:33 October 24 2008 #

Thank you for the answer.

It's possible to seperate the poll intervalls, so the disk space is only polled once a day whereas the temperature is checked more frequently?

A possibility to check the disk status is the dropbear ssh server, if installed. But this spins the disks up, if the server isn't installed on a USB-stick.

mygeneral

12:26 November 26 2008 #

Hi Phil
found the gadget when it was a .8x release and used it ever since. Brilliant and so handy.
Can i add something to the wish list - a tab for the bit commet downloader so we know what the status is of each bit commet being downloaded or seeded.
It would save having to go into the web page regularly to check.
Then if that is working a button to clear the completed downloads would also be useful.
Finally (but ot essential) you can configure the drive used (I map the drive for BT) - and press a button to go to the completed downloads.

Just a thought for you next set major release.

Cheers for doing this gaget - its been so useful to me.

R.

rich

07:50 November 28 2008 #

>is it possible to seperate the poll intervalls, so the disk space is only polled once a day whereas the temperature is checked more frequently?

Good idea - it's not that straight forward as there's basically one loop for the whole thing, but I could maybe have a setting which is something like "check the disk space only once in every n cycles" or something like that... that would be easy enough. That way you could do it, and if I default the parameter to 1 then everybody would be still ok.

Bit Torrents
Also a good idea... let's discuss on email. I don't use BT so that's the main limitation there.

(I must fix the BBcode thing on this blog!)

philw

10:51 November 28 2008 #

Here's how to run this under XP:

http://forum.dsmg600.info/t3430-*HOWTO*-DNS-323-Windows-Vista-Gadget.html

Zoltan

Cirip

00:44 December 10 2008 #

Would it be possible to get the source code?
Looks like it would be a great "HOW TO" example for Vista gadgets.

Russel

13:32 December 12 2008 #

Actually everyone has it... just download the file from here, and save it on your machine somewhere. It has an extension ".gadget", but actually it's a zip file... so rename that extension to "zip", and then you can open it with Windows Explorer and extract the contents. Alternatively, install it, then fin dthe directory the gadgets run in, and you will see the files all there.

What I do is to "clone" the gadget from the site here, and rename it so I can distinguish it from the original. Then I can change the files of the program, press the "reload" link (the title of the gadget), and see how the changes affect the way it behaves. I also use a simple traving tool to assist with Debug.

It should be fairly easy to understand and it's commented. Basically it's a simple table of commands to send to the NAS, underpinned by a class which handles the TCP/IP communication and then a separate one which handles parsing the responses and formatting the output.

Phil

15:21 December 12 2008 #

Hi Phil,

thank you so much for that great gadget!!
Two things I would like to report:
1) When you click "cli" the connected client IPs are shown. The first IP is shown in the first line, but the others are shown all together in the second line. Could you insert a line break after the 2nd, 3rd, 4th IP for better legibility? Thanks!

2) Could you make the 1st and 2nd volume/disk clickable in the "status", so that the explorer would open? Would be useful.

Keep on that grat work!

Cheers,
nsign

nsign

11:43 December 19 2008 #

New firmware for the Conceptronic CH3SNAS 1.05 doesn't show the temperature anymore.
Can you fix it?
Such a easy and nice program to use. Keep up the good work!

harry

19:12 January 4 2009 #

Hi Phil,

Great gadget, love it! I'm no expert on javascript/gadgets, but I'm guessing you can only retrieve data from the device (CH3SNAS in my case) that's already provided by the web interface. I'd like to see the load average of the unit (cat /proc/loadavg), but don't know if there's on option for that.

Regards,
Juice

Juice

20:03 January 4 2009 #

Hi Phil,

Great gadget. Since I have 2 x DNS-323's it'd be nice to be able to name each gadget and be able to have 2 gadgets in my sidebar. I tried configuring 2 instances of the gadget separately, but it seems you can only have 1 set of settings and both gadgets pick up the same one. I'm sure not a priority for you since most people only have 1, but if you ever feel the inclination it'd be handy.

Nick.

Nick

14:51 January 10 2009 #

Ok, here's the 1.06 firmware:
support.dlink.com/.../view.asp?productid=DNS-323#
The 1.00 gadget has been built and tested with that. Note that fewer features are available with this and I've not tested it with a CH3NAS as I don't have one.

philw

17:00 January 16 2009 #

It works fine on my CH3SNAS with firmware 1.05b1 (latest so far), including temperature.

The 1.000 won't install right away. My Vista installed the files to \<ususal path>\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\NasMonitor1.000.gadget.~0000\NasMonitor1.000.gadget . Manually moved it back to \<ususal path>\Windows Sidebar\Gadgets\NasMonitor1.000.gadget and it works now.

Thanks again!

Juice

17:11 January 16 2009 #

thanks for the quick fix

harry

20:28 January 21 2009 #

The shutdown function doesn't work anymore on my CH3SNAS with this latest release, any idea what is wrong or is it just me?

harry

23:16 January 22 2009 #

It gets better and better! Thanks for the effort you put in this!

10:45 January 24 2009 #

Thanks for the gadget! I just upgraded to version FW 1.06 and to version 1.003 for the gadget. Apparently the gadget doesn't shutdown the Nas anymore...
I can see a "shutdown OK" message, but the NAS is still on.

Any ideas?

Cheers
Maurizio

Maurizio

08:41 February 2 2009 #

thx. for a great tool.

I have a small request ;o) I don't know if its possible, but what about a option to enable or disable DHCP, Itunes, UPnP, FTP or LLTD ?

Just like eg. the reset button. where you have to press yes or no.

Bravoosca

20:33 February 19 2009 #

Great Gadget.

Any chance that cpu utilization could be added to this? Or anyone know of a gadget that does this?

netmind

01:11 March 7 2009 #

Great widget, thank you. I'm not sure why i really need to see this information real time, but I LIKE IT! I see others are adding to the wishlist, so I will as well. Have you thought about Network stats, if it is even possible?

Again thanks.

Chris Mullins

22:02 March 18 2009 #

I have 2 CH3SNAS at the moment and using 2 gadgets at the same time. It's working fine when i just setup both gadgets using 2 different IP addresses (static). The problem occurs after a reboot or shutdown of both NAS.
Both gadgets get the same IP address, so they are showing the same info from just one NAS.
If i change the IP of one of the NAS again each gadget displays the correct info again.
Is there a way to use 2 of the same gadgets at the same time? Some kind ow workaround? Or can you make 2 differnt gadget with different ID's or something.
Thanks for the great little prog BTW

Harry

18:20 April 4 2009 #

The 1.08 beta firmware seems to brake the gadget because it displays "log on timeout" on the status page. Once in a while, the gadget seems to be able to log onto the DNS.

James

23:11 May 16 2009 #

great gadget.

Work fine with firmware 1.08 beta.

mwlodarc

08:18 July 8 2009 #

i use version 1.004 running windows seven rc7100 with a dns-313(rev.a, fw 1.03) and it works!
only temperature still not available, and itunes server is shown as disabled when its not.
great!!

stef

00:29 August 31 2009 #

Thought that only with a small modification officer. Then wait to officially quit version 1.08

Carlos Sanchez

15:35 December 8 2009 #

I used with satisfaction your gadget for my 2 nas.
As you already made the script to shut down the nas, do you think it's possible to extract this to have a simple command (.bat or .exe) to switch off a nas with entering user a password in an ini file ?
I absolutely don't know how work java script so I cannot do this myself. Can you help me ?
I need a commande to switch off my nas's after backup.

Many thanks in advance and i'm sure that's can be helpfull for other user.

Sebastien Francois

09:56 December 9 2009 #

Yes, you want to use something like WGET. That's actually what I did before I wrote the gadget. You need to "reverse engineer" the NAS web page to see what you have to do to shut it down (which is basically: login, then programatically "press" the shut down button). Then stick those two commands into a batch file which uses WGET to sent the http requests to the NAS web page. That's how you do it.. at the moment you're competing for my time with some people with very deep pockets, so I can't write it for you I'm afraid. Probably someone has published something to do that somewhere.

philw

08:42 December 10 2009 #

Can you please update it so it works with windows 7 dpi properly? I have windows 7 and dpi set to medium(default) or 125% and the widget is off and the text doesn't fit because of this. My monitor is 1680x1050 and all other widgets I've used including 3rd party ones are displaying correctly.

Can you please update it to fix that issue or if its REALLY easy(like any simpleton can do it) I can do it myself? Thanks!

Mike B

23:04 January 5 2010 #

I figured out the Win7 dpi thing. To fix the widget for Windows 7 edit Gadget.xml and add:
<autoscaleDPI>true</autoscaleDPI>
right below <host name="sidebar"> and your good to go.

My last question is did you ever think more about splitting out the interval for hard drive space vs temperature? Right now the 10 minute default time spins up the HDs way too often for me but setting it longer than that wouldn't be helpful for temperature. Ideally I'd do 24hrs for storage and 10 minutes for temperature. That of course only really works if polling the temp doesn't actually spin up the HD which you seemed to have indicated above. Thanks again for the gadget!

Mike B

00:16 January 6 2010 #

Hope to see it working on 1.8 Beta. Great app anyway!! Keep on the good work!

Mattias R

19:14 January 20 2010 #

(I re-opened comments temporarily - I'll shut them once the spammers start up again - wankers.)

I just tested it against 1.08 production and the first time I ran it I got time-out errors ("log on timeout"). This was also reported to me by another user. With the default 3-second (3000ms) timeout, the NAS is no longer responding quickly enough. I'm testing on a full-duplex Gigabit LAN (not sure what the NAS has in there), Windows 7 Pro, nothing else between me and the NAS. I increased the timeout bit by bit and 10 seconds seems to do the job. I note that it's not taking 10 seconds to actually refresh the whole thing, and as it sends multiple HTTP requests, clearly it's not taking 9 seconds between each. So I probably coded the timeout wrong, in that it looks like it's a timeout for the whole set of requests (ie: it must do everything within 10 seconds), rather than the (more correct) timeout on each command. I don't have the time right now to go in there to fix it, but....

If you have timeout problems with 1.08 and the gadget, just bump the timeout up to 10 seconds and it should work fine.

If anyone has any other problems found with 1.08 then please shout (and feel free to fix the problems as I'm slightly too busy to do it at the moment).

philw

12:57 March 20 2010 #

Wonderful and simple advice to get it running again!. Thank you!

Mattias R

17:15 April 8 2010 #

What is the differance between Poll interval and Timeout?

Thanks

P01arBear

06:47 April 14 2010 #

Hi Phil, Devin here. Just wanted to let you know that I have updated the MultiNas Installer to include a page that describes the remedy to the login errors in firmware 1.08.
Hope everything is going good with you.

Take Care,
Devin Rawlek

Devin Rawlek

02:26 April 26 2010 #

Poll interval: time between polling the device. Make this long if you have the NAS set to sleep on idle, as every poll "wakes" the disk so it can check the capacity on it.
Timeout: time to wait for a response from the device after making a TCP/IP request to it. If you get timeouts consider increasing this until you don't.

philw

08:10 April 28 2010 #

Unable to get it to work under Windows 7 Ultimate, I have tryed EN and DK version of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.

I starts ok up , but on the status page the temperature and the firmware version are not displayed.
on the servers page, the LLTD are not displayed, and under Power man it says /goform/
on the graph page, there is no graph.

Bo Eckhardt

16:57 May 24 2010 #

Compatibility 1.09?

Carlos Sanchez

11:48 July 1 2010 #

This is for Bo Eckhardt (and anyone else have the same problems):

I have the exact same issue (DNS-323 at 1.08, Vista 64 Home Premium). But here's what's interesting...when I sign on to the DNS-323 webpage using the same computer the gadget is running on, and then immediately refresh the gadget, the gadget works properly again! But I notice that even if I continuously navigate around the web page, it frequently logs me out even if I had just signed on seconds earlier - and when it does log me out and I again refresh the gadget, the gadget again comes up with the same symptoms you are describing.

The only way I can get the gadget to work is to sign on to the web page, then immediately refresh the gadget before it signs me off - which can happen very quickly! Works everytime but I know hardly convenient. But it seems to me not to be a problem with Phil's really excellent gadget; it's something to do with the DNS-323 forcing a signoff for some apparently unknown reason. By the way, I never had this problem with the DNS-323 on any previous firmwares - only at 1.08 does it continuously sign me off even if I am actively using it (and as soon as it does sign me off, the gadget also stops working).

I have re-flashed the firmware, and also reset all my settings, but still have the same symptoms.

I'm curious if you try to sign on to the web page then immediately refresh the gadget on the same computer if it now (temporarily) works for you.

Eric Peters

22:47 July 1 2010 #

With me, I've got fairly same error as above, getting no data out of the NAS, just a single bar with no temps, no graphs, and no servers enabled... Can it be fixed? or can anyone tell me how to? Weird thing is that sometimes it just works...

The "solution" above seems to work. But that is kind of a hassle. The NAS-webpages don't quickly log me out, only if I'm not active for about 15 minutes...

Jan Pollet

21:16 July 18 2010 #

I am getting log on error 504 running 1.09.

Jerry Smith

00:55 July 23 2010 #

That's a http error - basically it's similar to a 404 error: the gadget is unable to see the NAS on the network for some reason.
http://www.checkupdown.com/status/E504.html

philw

08:27 July 23 2010 #

I am using NAS323 1.09 and some days after installing the widget wont work and I get log on error 12029 and after log on error 504.
values I have in the widget are poll 600000 timeout 100000 Any help?

Jerry Smith

16:31 July 27 2010 #

Comments don't appear immediately as I need to check they're not spam. Spammers are welcome to play with the captcha, then they can try to steer their dribble past the four online anti-spam services I'm using. Once they've wasted that much time it seems a shame for me to stick them on my blacklist with a click of the mouse. However that's why there's not a single spam comment here, wankers.

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DNS 323 Windows 7/ Vista Gadget

Version 1.004 (1.06 firmware onwards - tested on 1.06, 1.07 and 1.08)

Version 0.999 (1.05 firmware only)

Features

Buttons

Settings

Limitations/ other stuff

Pages