What I want from a home server (3): Monitoring and User Management February 16
Welcome to part 3 of our series
What I want for a home server
We’re fresh after our recent release of the F8 version of our server platform. After some good hacking, we’re ready to continue with various improvements. There are so many things to do, from installation to apps, that it’s hard to chose!
Our series is inspired by Svein Wisnaes, who wrote and posted his great ideas.
Today, we’re covering monitoring and user control.
Monitoring
He writes about health monitoring of critical components in the network.
There are protocols to monitor hardware today. Especially hard drives that are S.M.A.R.T. enabled. So why not do this centrally? Use the same agent that do the backup control to continually monitor the hard drive, fans, CPU of the pc it is running on and send any critical messages immediately to the server. There you can have a program that send alerts by e-mail, sms, make a call through an IP-Phone and play a recorded message etc. This should not be complicated to set up. And it would be a good thing to send status for each PC on a regular basis so the server builds a statistics that can be reviewed.
Monitoring is something we do, to a basic extent, on our server at the moment. We track manufacturer and temperature status of the drives in the system.
In the PC world, there are some alternatives for monitoring and control. On the server side, there is IPMI, which is really for servers in datacenters more than anything else, and on the desktop side, there is ASF and more recent protocol by Intel called AMT (Active Management Technology). However, these are far from being adopted and will take a while to reach the regular home networks.
In this line, we received a request recently to provide wake-on-LAN capability as a way to control the various machines in the network.
User Management
This is an area that we’re not ready with yet, however, it is very important area, as the ultimate purpose of having a cool home server is to serve the users in the network. Quoting Svein,
This add one more to the given list. I would like to set up both users and groups and have an easy way of adding users to groups. I like using groups instead of user to control access to functions. The server need to be able to run really headless. No monitor, no keyboard and no mouse.
This is spot-on. We’re working to manage users with LDAP, however, that is work in progress …
In the mean time, go check out: