Tuesday·28·March·2017
System Tray Icon to Monitor a Linux Software RAID Locally //at 04:09 //by abe
About a year ago I bought a new workstation computer for myself at home. It’s a Tuxedo XUX_Cube which is advertised as gaming PC. But I ordered a slightly atypical non-gamer configuration:
- As much RAM as possible (64 GB)
- Intel i7 CPU, but the low power variant
- Only with the onboard Intel graphics card. (No need for NVidia binary crap drivers.)
- 2× Samsung 128 GB SSD for OS and $HOME plus 2× 3 TB WD Red disks for media storage; both pairs set up as RAID 1
- Bitfenix Prodigy-M case in Orange. (Not available in Tuxedo Computer’s online shop, but they nevertheless ordered it for me. :-)
Of course the box runs Debian. To be more precise, it runs Debian Sid
with sysvinit-core as init system and i3 as window manager.
As I usually have no monitoring clients on my laptops and private
workstations, I rather often felt the urge to do a cat
/proc/mdstat on that box.
So at some point I wanted something like smart-notifier, but for Linux Software (MD) RAIDs. And since I found nothing, I did what Open Source guys usually do in such cases: I wrote it myself — of course in Perl — and called it systray-mdstat.
First I wondered about which build system would be most suitable for that task, but in the end I once again went with Dist::Zilla for the upstream build system and hence dh-dist-zilla for the Debian packaging.
Ideas for the actual implementation were taken from Wouter’s fdpowermon for the systray icon framework in Perl and Myon’s mdstat Xymon plugin for an already proven logic to
parse /proc/mdstat. (Both, Wouter and Myon have stated in
a GnuPG-signed e-mail that I copied less code than would validate
their copyrights, so I was able to license it under a single license,
namely GNU GPL version 3.)
As of now, systray-mdstat is also available as package in
Debian Unstable. It won’t make it to Stretch as its first line of code
has been written after the soft-freeze for Stretch was already in
place.
Tagged as: Bitfenix, Debian, dh-dist-zilla, Dist::Zilla, dzil, GitHub, hardware, i3, Linux, orange, Perl, Prodigy-M, RAID, systray-mdstat, Tuxedo Computers
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