App for feedback and little control

Hey, guys
Still using flexraid and proud

I came back here to give some feedback hoping to make flexraid eve better
I'll be posting it on mantis where it belongs too

Just a small case that just occurred to me to explain the request

'cause of some performance issues I was forced to exchange one of my storage server HD's with one in other machine I have
no problem with it, but on the mounting back, I just messed up and let the PPU HD cable loose
server restared fine but I didn't noticed the issue 'cause the PPU is exclusive for this purpose
than I decided to do a quick validade throught the webUI and got a fail due to the missing unit
just then I figured the problem out
reopened the server, put the cable back and got it running fine
with the server running ok with all the drives detected I went back to do the quick validate and got a fail 'cause a validade task was running

the question here is: there is no clear, explicit and easy feedback on whatever flexraid is doing

some small system tray app would be great for this
maybe some color based icon

red for some fail (validation or any other important fail), maybe with a popping toast...
yellow for some actitity (scheduled or demanded action as verify, update or so)
and green if flexraid is idle and everything is fine since the last verify (quick or standard)

right clicking the tray icon would bring a context menu with some controls like stop or pause a running task, or to manually start one if idle
and a option to open the full interface with the webUI on localhost
maybe a link to the log page on webIU some other forum friend asked for

such small app would be very nice and important to users (newbies or not) to have live and easy feedback and control of flexraid

as I said, hope it helps to make flexraid even better
keep up the good job guys

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Fair point but given that this also runs on headless servers another suggestion to just have it more apparent in the WebUI that flex is doing something (as opposed to the windows system tray).
(e.g. a box in the corner)

Would also work the the linux side without additional work as well.

As replied on Mantis, I agree that more notification would be great. There is a very similar feature request already too.

I thought about it a bit, and there are 3 points worth outlining:
1. If I add the feature to the WebUI, the notification might go unnoticed if the browser is closed or minimized.
2. A tray icon as pointed by webs0r would be useless in a headless scenario.
3. Setting the preferences to be notified by email or SMS whenever FlexRAID is doing something (already supported) is another option but it can be a bit spam'ish.

One thing I definitely need to fix is notification of scheduler triggered operations so that configuration windows are grayed out just like when doing manual operations.
I think that might be the major issue we are dealing with here.

Other thoughts?

Brahim wrote:2. A tray icon as pointed by webs0r would be useless in a headless scenario.

How about small "client-server" application, where "tray icon application" tries to get FlexRAID notifications via network? That network can be of course "localhost" if "tray application" is installed on the same computer where FlexRAID is running, but also another (headless) server or any other computer running FlexRAID in the network.

I'd rather have this in the WebUI, as I won't care what flexRAID is doing in the background anyways unless I want to change some settings or start a task - and the place to do that is in the WebUI.

paavor wrote:

How about small "client-server" application, where "tray icon application" tries to get FlexRAID notifications via network? That network can be of course "localhost" if "tray application" is installed on the same computer where FlexRAID is running, but also another (headless) server or any other computer running FlexRAID in the network.

Everything in FlexRAID follows the Client-Server model.
So, yeah, a tray application will be very useful to some users and could monitor any remote FlexRAID service.
This would be like writing a very light FlexRAID client that only shows statuses.

To be frank, this would have to be a third party app.
So, maybe post this in the Client Developer sub-forum to invite those interested to take a stab at it.
I have made communicating with the FlexRAID core service very easy.

This was exactly what I was thinking.

Since FlexRAID already has infrastructure ready for "server side", it should be relatively easy for someone to write tiny tray application. Maybe FlexRAID could be even extended so, that everything that would be sent as an email/sms, could be forwarded to that tray app and then notified to user?

Unfortunately my programming skills are too basic to do even this.

wow, never spected that much repercution

my config is almost headless too, even been a windows based server
but i access it a lot via remote desktop since it's not a storage only machine (runs some other services too)

must admit i forgot the linux branch (shame on me being a resources manager and dealing with more than 300 linux servers daily)
but the idea of a small network app is great

i'd say java. so the exact same app would run on windows or linux or any other device. local, network or even via internet
even more. i'd say the way is a small webservice.
i'm pretty much rusty on my java progaming but i'll talk with some friends and read the core communications doc

thanks for the replies

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