SMART Disk Monitor - All Release Notes

In previous builds the installation did not automatically install the platform dependent .Net 2.0 Framework on I64 and X64 computers that did not already have the prerequisite installed. The installation has been modified to, if necessary, download the prerequisites from Microsoft and install them.

The query disks dialog now uses a background thread pool that enables users to cancel out of the dialog prior to completion.

In previous builds the help displayed an empty page when the user pressed F1 from within the Directory Monitor Wizard. This bug has been fixed.

When dragging and dropping a monitored disk to another logical group, the expanded directory tree nodes would incorrectly show a check box. This bug has been fixed.

When rebooting a Server 2003 machine, the service would fail to start when the service was configured to forward internal messages to a syslog server. The failure occurs when the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service has not yet started. The installation has been updated to install the service with a dependency on WMI. If the software was previously installed, you must uninstall and then re-install for this change to take effect.

Users can now create CSV, TXT, and XML directory size reports that do not include sub-directory information.

In response to a customer request we created a directory size report that does not include sub-directory information. While testing the template we ran into a bug that caused the new template to fail. This bug has been fixed. This build also includes the new template we created. The template is called ‘directory_size_no_sub_dirs.html’ and is located in c:\program files\diskmonitor\htmltemplates.

The map computer dialog no longer allows users to see the assigned password.

The service can now be configured to automatically apply a disk monitor template to newly discovered computers. For more information see Automatically Configuring New Computers with in the help file.

Updated toolbar buttons to fall in line with Text Log Monitor.

Users can now specify to exclude weekends when scheduling reports and configuring monitors.

The directory monitor now saves size information to a history file. The history file is used to populate a graph and can also be emailed to other users. To view the graph right click on the directory and select Properties.

Version 2008 includes many user interface enhancements, optimizations, updated email and HTML output, and support for many different types of alerts and actions.

SMART Disk Monitor now includes an option to receive notification when a directory size changes size between disk checks. To monitor a directory for size changes, from the Monitored Disks tree node within the Network view, navigate to the directory of interest. Right click and select Directory Monitor Wizard. Users can set both warning and critical thresholds.

System administrators can now create a single directory summary email report that includes directory and sub-directory size information from multiple sources. This function is ideal when attempting to verify disk content has been properly replicated to another disk. To create a directory summary report, create a disk monitor for each disk the target directory resides. Next navigate to the directory from the Monitored Disks tree node from within the Network view, highlight the directory, right click and select Directory Monitor Wizard. Complete and close the wizard (you can de-select all options if you do not need to monitor the directory size). Select Directory Summary Reports from the Tools menu item. Create a new report and complete the wizard.

System administrators can now monitor directories for file changes, file creations, file deletions, and file renames. Upon detecting a change, a message can be written to a file or an email notification fired. The file monitor includes support for multiple filename filter masks as well as multiple filename exclusion masks.

The user interface threw a fatal error on computers with Symantec SNAC Network Provider installed. This bug has been fixed.

The last accessed files report did not correctly return all the last accessed files. This bug has been fixed.

When running a report that shows all files that have not been accessed since a specific date an error was thrown when the directory and file name concatenated exceed the maximum Windows supported length. This bug has been fixed.

Fixed forward and backward clock issues.

When a local disk is not formatted, an access denied error was thrown. This bug has been fixed.

In previous builds, the summary report did not impersonate causing blank or N/A results when access was denied. This bug has been fixed.

The access permissions reports had several path related bugs when monitoring remote

In previous builds, the access permissions report settings were not saved to the directory monitor templates. This bug has been fixed.

When running an access permission report, any directories the caller does not have access too would cause the report to exit. The behavior has been changed to simply log the error and continue.

The Summary Report Wizard dialog did not include both Close and Cancel buttons. This bug has been fixed.

When making changes to the summary report, users were not always prompted to save their changes. This bug has been fixed.

In previous builds, users could not use email servers such as gmail because they require a SSL connection. SSL support has now been added to the email client.

When making some installation changes for Windows Vista, a maintenance installation bug was introduced that caused some maintenance installations to fail. This bug has been fixed.

On certain systems update installations and un-installations would fail due to a system library missing. This bug has been fixed.

Added some debug messages to the access permissions reports when validating users.

Access permissions reports now provide the user with the option to validate each returned user against Active Directory. The result is that reports are limited to real domain users. All internal local system accounts are removed from the report.

Users can now specify if they want to include the owner of a directory or file when creating an access permissions report.

Summary reports now include used space percent used columns.

Users can now create reports that recurse a drive, share, or directory and list either the last X number of files that have been accessed or the first 10,000 files that have not been accessed since a date.

All application data files are now stored in the common and application data paths.

When adding new monitors the Monitored Disks tree node was previously refreshed sometimes causing the disk query window to open and query all disks. This behavior has been modified so new monitors are simply added to the list.

The installation now closes all open S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor windows.

The Access Permissions tab in the Directory Configuration Wizard did not have the correct label descriptions. This bug has been fixed.

Disk and share nodes now include recurs information columns directory size, file count, and directory count.

Added De-Select All from menu item to the Edit menu and Network view’s right click menu. Clicking De-Select All will iterate the entire Network view un-checking all previously checked nodes.

The Directory Monitor wizard did not enforce the access permissions output report file extension. This bug has been fixed.

When the directory monitor fired a critical or warning alert, 2 messages that were very similar were written to the log. One of the messages was removed.

If saved a server name or its share names casing differed from the discovered casing, the access permissions reports would sometimes fail. This bug has been fixed.

Access permissions reports would error when attempted from a share. A message has been added limiting the report to administrator disk shares and local disks.

Summary reports wizard would overwrite previous reports if the same name but different casing was used. This bug has been fixed.

Since build 5.0.0.45, the tray icon was not updating properly. This bug has been fixed.

The installation executable and all Corner Bowl Software developed binaries are now digitally signed.

On Windows Vista, the installation would install the shortcuts with Standard rights even though the program requires administrator privileges. This bug has been fixed.

When running on Windows Vista, the software would send the IP address instead of the domain in the HELO or EHLO commands. Since Vista defaults to IPv6, the command would fail. The behavior has been changed to send the domain as required by the RFC 821 rather of the IP address.

In previous builds users on networks that utilize HTTP proxy servers were unable to register the software and receive automatic product updates. Once the proxy server is set via the registration dialog, users now receive automatic updates.

Added file extension reports.

After cancelling out of the Configuration Wizard, the application would sometimes re-query all the disks. This check no longer occurs when the Configuration Wizard is cancelled.

The service used to syslog all internal messages generated by the service to the local syslogger. The service no longer syslogs these messages unless the user specifically turns on syslogging. Use the Options dialog to turn on service syslogging

The demo version enabled users to configure as many disks as they wanted from the Configuration Wizard which later caused the application to deny the user the ability to re-configure a disk. This bug has been fixed.

When configuring a critical directory monitor alert, if the email address was not input the verification process would take the user back to the warning page rather than the critical page. This bug has been fixed.

The help file was updated to include help contents on the features added over the last several months.

When configuring the directory monitor, there was no way to specify a replacement tag. For example, if you want to skip the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ directory for all users, you were required to monitor each user’s ‘Documents and Settings’ directories and exclude the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ directory. You can now monitor one directory and mask the username so all ‘Temporary Internet Files’ directories are excluded. Specify ‘..’ in place of the directory to replace. In the above example, monitor the ‘Documents and Settings’ directory and specify the following exclusion: .\..\local settings\temporary internet files

The directory monitor templates now support relative path sub-directory exclusions. To specify a relative path, specify the path relative to the path being monitored. For example, to exclude all 'Program Files' sub-directories, specify ',\program files' in the 'Exclude sub-directory' text box.

When firing alerts or generating reports, temporary files were not deleted. This bug has been fixed.

You can now independently set the frequency to automatically clear critical and warning maximum directory size alerts.

The history file now contains a third column that contains the disk space used.

The title on the New Logical Group dialog was incorrect. This bug has been fixed.

You can now create summary reports. From the Tools menu item select Summary Reports. Summary reports are saved to the HTML output directory as configured in the Options dialog and are emailed to the assigned addresses.

If a disk configuration included sub-directory reports, and the disk was offline, the service would continue to poll the disk every minute. This bug has been fixed.

Added the directory access permissions reports to the Directory Configuration Wizard. Users can now automatically receive email notification of users with access to directories. CSV and XML reports can also be created.

The Configuration Wizard now supports saving configuration values enabling users to setup all the configuration parameters once and then import them when a new disk is configured.

All monitored disks now fall into an Unassigned Logical Group. To create logical grouping of monitored disks, select New Logical Group from the file menu. Drag and drop each server to move.

Scheduled directory size reports have been significantly updated. The email now displays an ASCII table, the CSV file report is optimized for Microsoft Excel, and lastly the file report can now be exported to XML as well as CSV.

Directory size reports now support an exclusion list. This list enables a directory size report to execute overlooking user specified directories. For example, if you create a report to iterate an entire drive, you can now add the 'program files' and 'windows' directories to the exclusion list, enabling the report to be limited to non OS related content.

The warning and critical threshold tags did not display the correct values in the alert emails. This bug has been fixed.

DiskMonitor can now fire an email when a directory exceeds a configured size.

Added the option to print the detail view contents.

Added the option to print the directory rights report.

Added directory rights report. To generate a directory rights report, select the disk or directory. Select Generate Directory Rights Report from the Tools menu item.

The error alert would fire every time there was an error rather than waiting for the alert to be cleared. This bug has been fixed.

The warning and critical alert tabs have been updated to enable users to change any option on the page for all selected disks while leaving the remaining configured parameters intact. For example, you can update the email for all selections while leaving the subject for each selection intact.

The service toolbar buttons are now updated every 15 seconds.

If a disk configuration is corrupt, an error message is logged and the configuration removed.

Added automatic display of Map Computer dialog when access to a computer’s shares is denied.

Fixed several bugs related to icon updates in the tree view and list view.

Added S.M.A.R.T. support.

Added several email subject and message tags.

The tree view and list view icons were washed out. This bug has been fixed.

When jumping to the Verify tab from within the Configuration Wizard, the next time the user clicked on the Next or Finished button, the dialog would not close but instead move to the first tab. This bug has been fixed.

If the query thread threw an exception, the application would crash. A try catch handler has been added to prevent the crash.

When upgrading, the installation uninstalled the service and re-installed it. When re-installed, the previous credentials were dropped. The upgrade installation no longer uninstalls the service but rather stops the service, updates the file, and lastly re-starts the service maintaining the service credentials.

The Change Service Login dialog did not support an account with a blank password. This bug has been fixed.

Updated the icon the system tray displays when the service is off.

The installation now supports installation to a directory other than the default.

Machines that had multiple IP addresses might display an error at startup stating the license was assigned to another computer. This bug has been fixed.

Fixed several critical bugs with the schedule controls in the Configuration Wizard

In some cases a schedule would be executed 2 times in a row. This bug has been fixed.

The schedule algorithm was enhanced to include hourly and monthly frequencies.

When creating HTML documents on systems that had significantly installed earlier versions of DiskMonitor, the export produced a file in use error. The export was overwriting other html files that had been created. This bug has been fixed.

Earlier builds and versions of DiskMonitor used disk names as the registry key rather than a GUID as in now done. On these systems, the previous build caused a fatal error to be thrown when exporting the query results to HTML. This bug has been fixed.

Fixed error when displaying disk utilization over time on non US systems.

If configuring multiple disks that have different threshold alert values, you can now set the email address for all the selected disks.

Setup now enforces licensing

Alerts used to only get cleared during a scheduled disk query. Alerts are now cleared when they are scheduled to clear regardless if a disk query should execute or not.

HTML documents are now automatically created enabling users to publish disk status automatically to web servers.

Disk properties form now shows the alert status and the last time the warning and critical alert fired.

When you select the monitored disks tree node and press F5, the disks are re-queried.

When viewing the monitored disks in the list view, if you sorted by a column other than the first column, the utilization bar did not update correctly. This bug has been fixed.

The disk query status window was not updating the status above the list view control. This bug has been fixed.

Service output window now uses icons and colors.

Removed the ChartFX charting engine and replaced it with an open source project.

Removed the properties and configuration dialog integration and instead only use the wizard to configure now. The configuration wizard has been redesigned.

WMI support was dropped and instead use Windows shares. Systems that do not support WMI but support Windows shares can now be inspected. For example Linux systems with Samba installed or older RAID devices.

Folders that are configured for reporting now have an icon for visual identification.

You can now update the credentials for a mapped computer.

Updated the licensing scheme to include a digitally signed license file that must be downloaded from our registration web service.

The .Net binaries are now obfuscated.

If the system clock was advanced into the future, the service would execute every missed schedule between the old time and the new time. This bug has been fixed.

Some spam filters delete messages that do not have a valid internet domain name in the from address. The default has been changed from DiskMonitor@[HOSTNAME] to DiskMonitor@[HOSTNAME].com.

Updated several column alignments in the detail view.

Updated the look and feel of the configuration wizard.

When updating to build 5.0.0.6, some versions may have seen an error message stating the latest version could not be downloaded. This bug has been fixed.

When you changed an already configured directory recursion report schedule and nothing else in the dialog, the new schedule was not saved. This bug has been fixed.

The Monitored Disks now sort.

You can now check the Monitored Disks tree node and all disks under that node will check.

Disk property dialog now supports resizing. Several icons were also added to the dialog.

Updated logic on configure and delete so duplicate toolbar icons could be removed.

Added a copy function that creates a formatted string and copies it to the clipboard when focus is in the detail view and the user presses Ctrl-C.

Added several new icons to the menu and toolbar.

The monitored disks did not sort in the list view. This bug has been fixed.

Major user interface upgrade and misc. bug fixes.

When attempting to view a report before the service has been configured to poll the disk, an error message would display stating the report file could not be found. This bug has been fixed.

Added automatic directory usage reportng. From a configured disk, select the directory and click Schedule Report from the Tools menu. You can also use the Reports tab on the disk properties dialog.

The chart was displaying the usage incorrectly. The chart type was stacked 100% and has been changed to stacked.

Upgraded compiler to Visual Studio 2005

Updated more visual styles

Removed check boxes from tree nodes that can not be configured.

Added this readme.