xtaran / systray-mdstat

System tray icon indicating the state of local Linux Software (MD) RAIDs

systray-mdstat

systray-mdstat is a system tray icon indicating the state of local Linux Software (MD) RAID by checking /proc/mdstat periodically:

It works at least on Linux and should work with any freedesktop.org-compliant status area (aka system tray).

Use Case

The use cases for this utility are probably rather restricted:

• Desktop or laptop with Linux Software RAID (i.e. at least two permanent disks)

• Not wanting to have any remote monitoring (e.g. for privacy reasons or due to lacking a permanent internet connection or an appropriate monitoring server).

Requirements

• Perl 5 ≥ 5.10
• a bunch of Perl modules:
  • Gtk3
  • Desktop::Notify
  • List::Util (part of Perl's core)
  • Pod::Usage (part of Perl's core)
  • Try::Tiny
  • File::ShareDir to run and File::ShareDir::Install to build and install.

Installation

From a Distribution Package

systray-mdstat is available in most Debian-based distribution releases since about mid-2017:

• Debian 10 Buster and later
• Devuan 3.0 Beowulf and later
• Raspbian 10 Buster and later
• Trisquel 9.0 LTS Etiona and later
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic and later

Of course it's also available in rolling release distributions based on Debian Testing or Unstable:

• Kali Linux
• ParrotOS
• PureOS

It's also available in these non-Debian based distributions:

• Arch User Repository (AUR)

For a complete and more current list of versions see the nice overview at Repology:

Building from a Release Tar Ball

Works like most Perl modules or perl-based applications:

$ tar xzf systray-mdstat systray-mdstat-<version>.tar.gz
$ cd systray-mdstat-<version>
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ make test
$ make install

Building from a Git Checkout

• Requires Dist::Zilla. Once Dist::Zilla is installed, running dzil authordeps will list the additionally needed Dist::Zilla plugins. After installing them, use dzil build to get a tar ball usable with any CPAN-compatible toolset.

  Afterwards continue as above.

• Building the Debian package from Git source requires the above plus dh-dist-zilla (which is also available as binary package in more recent releases of Debian and Ubuntu). Running dpkg-checkbuilddeps in the cloned git repository will list all missing build dependencies.

Companion Tools

• smart-notifier (website gone, available in Debian, historic sources also available via snapshot.debian.org: Notifies about S.M.A.R.T. changes your hard disks.

Similar Tools

• diskmonitor for KDE: Monitors both, SMART and MD RAID health status.

Version Number Scheme

systray-mdstat adheres to Semantic Versioning, hence all version numbers have the scheme Break.Feature.Bugfix.

Author, Copyright and License

Copyright © 2017-2020 by Axel Beckert [email protected]

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see GNU's website for an online copy.

Notes

• The initial code is very loosely based on the outer framework of the far more complex fdpowermon by Wouter Verhelst under Poul-Henning Kamp's "Beer-ware" license and the tiny mdstat check from Debian's hobbit-plugins package written by Christoph Berg under the MIT license. (Both, Christoph and Wouter stated that the amount of code I copied is too small to make their copyright apply, hence I'm not bound to the licenses they used for their code.)

• The icons in the subdirectory share were taken from the dmraid plugin of phpsysinfo and are licensed at least under the GNU GPL version 2, but maybe also under other versions of the GNU GPL.

systray-mdstat's Issues

Needs a test suite

Automated testing should find grave issues like this Debian bug report with ease. This would also open the doors for things like using Travis CI, Debian's (as-installed) autopkgtest, etc.

One possible tool respectively test library to run such tests is X11::GUITest. Another thing would be to separate GUI code and functionality as much as possible to be able to test as much as possible without running the GUI.

Two more ideas for that:

• Don't run main() function if loaded as library to be able to test all contained functions separately.
• Add option to pass alternate location of (e.g. fake) /proc/mdstat.