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[philw]

I wanted something which would just let me keep an eye on my 323 without me having to open a web page onto it, so I built a desktop Gadget for Vista which does that. I also put buttons on there to restart and power down the machine.

You can download it from here.

Now I've found this place I'll add a link to here from there in the next version

[Tank_Killer]

Holy crap that gadget rocks!

nice job man!

[jswashburn]

Ya, no doubt. That's awsome! 

Karma points for you 

[ECF]

pretty sweet!!!

[Tank_Killer]

It seems my HD's wont spin down while i have the gadget on.  Anyone else get this?  Maybe i should set the check time intervals longer. 

[philw]

I just updated this to 0.98 with support for two separate drives as well as the single-disk or single-logical disk. There are various other tweaks such as graphs of space/ temperature versus time. I think it's about done, but I left a couple of numbers free before 1.00.

Oh, and I moved it to here:
here
although the update code should get that magically.


On disk spinning... I suppose that if you ask the NAS what the disk usage is, it probably spins it up to read it and find out. So I think it may well work as you suggest. Mine lives in another building so I can't easily check, but that's probably it. Perhaps I should put an option in which says "don't check disk space", so you can leave it checking that the NAS is alive without actually spinning the disks up. Hmm.

[ckoebel]

Sweet! Thou rockest 

[dakial]

Hi Phil!
Great gadget, just tested it! But the sad thing is I use the Google desktop! Is it difficult for you to replicate your vista sidebar gadget to google desktop?

I would be happy!

Cheers!

[philw]

Funny you should ask. Last week I spent some time searching around to try to find a JS abstraction layer, something you could use that to isolate the gadget logic from the underlying framework. I couldn't find one, although it's kind of surprising that's so. There is a tool which apparently will convert a Google Gadget to a Vista one, although not the other way around.

I then had a look at Google Gadgets. The documentation is confusing - they have many things which they call "gadgets".

Anyway, I wrote an abstraction layer and got the gadget running on Google's Desktop API.

I then discovered what I should have read in the documentation first: Google Gadgets won't render html. Well you can render it in a "fly out", but not in the basic gadget, which uses some proprietary technology which looks a bit like HTML/DOM (no CSS), but isn't.

So I was going to have to remove all the HTML/DOM/CSS stuff and replace it with hard coded proprietary Google controls.... That one slipped past the "don't be evil" filter I guess. Add to that the fact that the Google Gadget designer is pitiful, and I lost interest in the project.

Some of the web based Google gadget platforms seem to be more based on web standards; it may be easier to maintain a system across Vista/ Google using those. I may take a look at these.

Otherwise, I think it would be easier to recode the thing from scratch as a Google Desktop Gadget. My abstraction layer was getting to be larger than the whole thing. The reason I didn't do that is that then I'd have two branches of code to maintain, the codebase would probably double in size, and also no one had really pushed for it.

The latest version of the gadget has a bunch of tweaks and fixes plus support for multiple disks and the CH3NAS.

[Sumdumphuc]

What a fantastic app
though I can't do this stuff (have tried and failed) how hard would it be to write up the code into a Yahoo widget, that way all windows users can use it and even mac users.

I have XP and would love to have this app.
I noticed D-link has 2 network monitors on the yahoo widget site but neither do this.

[philw]

I'll have a look at the Yahoo stuff - it may be better than the Google stuff.

[the bartender]

This plug-in installs for me, but never connects.

what should the IP be set to? I assumed the IP that i see when i connect to the 323.

[philw]

What does it say, when it fails to connect? IP address should be the same as you use to access the web interface; the Gadget default is the same as the shipping address of the DNS-323. You need username/ password also, then it should connect. As a minimum you will need to provide a password (in the settings).

[the bartender]

i dont get an error, it just doesnt connect (do anything)

have the IP correct  192.168.1.149 (which wasnt the default IP in the tool originally)
have the User (admin) and Password (not telling, lol) correct.

[philw]

Ok, click on the title where it says "NAS Monitor" in white. That reloads the whole thing. You will read the text "started up ok" in green. Then, what you see tells you what you're doing wrong:

(1) if it says "log on timeout" in red, then it's trying to logon, and the TCP/IP is timing out.
That means you have the wrong IP address for the NAS, or you have some related routing problem. Check the address. If you think it's right, compare it with that you have when you access your NAS. Hover over the little picture of the NAS in the device top right corner and click it. That should open the NAS login page. If you don't see the page, then you have either got the IP address wrong or your routing's stuffed up, which is a problem you'll need to fix.

(2) If it says "log on error 12029" in red, it's finding the NAS so you have the correct IP address, but it's failing to successfully log on. So you either have the user name ("admin") or the password wrong. Mostly likely it's the password - clear the field and type it in again, then press ok.

If that doesn't work... try restarting the NAS and trying again?