Windows Home Server – A user’s Experience » Blog Archive » View your Server’s motherboard information via the web

View your Server’s motherboard information via the web

January 1, 2008 – 9:10 pm

By combining Motherboard Monitor and Whiist it is possible to generate a web page that displays the information from your server’s motherboard (CPU & HDD temperatures, fan speeds etc) without having to know any HTML.

Procedure:

Download Motherboard Monitor and save to one of the WHS Shared Folders.
Remote Desktop to WHS and install Motherboard monitor.
Configure Motherboard Monitor for your server’s motherboard (NForce2 for me).
Open Motherboard Monitor and select Interval & System Log. (Fig.1)
Select Enable interval log and then check .HTML.
Select an appropriate time interval (I set mine to 3600s i.e. 1 hour).
Select a location to save the file, I put mine in a d:\shares\users\mark\websites\monitor.
Change the filename to “index”
Select the maximum number of interval entries. I choose 50, which meant I’d have just over 2 days worth of entries (because I was logging every hour)
Select Apply.

Motherboard Monitor is now logging every hour, and saving this information into index.html. Unfortunately it’s only doing this when you’re logged into your WHS. To get Motherboard Monitor running even when no one is logged in we need to run it as a service.

Download the AnyServiceInstaller and Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools and copy to the Server desktop
Install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit to the default directory
Run AnyServiceInstaller and enter the required paths and service name:
- C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools
- C:\Program Files\Motherboard Monitor 5\MBM5.exe
- MotherboardMonitor
Click Start and then right click on My Computer and select Manage.
Select Services and Applications, and then Services, then right click on MotherboardMonitor in the list.
Select the Log On tab and then check the This account radio button. Enter the Server administrator log on username and password and then click OK.
Restart the PC.

We can now use Whiist to define the chosen folder to be a website, and to add a link to our WHS Home page.

Download Whiist.
Copy to your WHS Add-in directory (usually (\\server\software\add-ins).
Open your WHS console and select settings-addins and choose Whiist.
In the main WHS console page select the Manage Website tab.
Select +Add, and then click next when the wizard appears.
Select the option to Create a new website that can be accessed from the internet.
Give the website a name (e.g. motherboardmonitor), and browse to the folder where you opted to save the index.html.
The next page will give you some configuration options, choose the options that suite you.
On the next page enter a name that will appear on the WHS homepage, and click finish.
Your website will now be listed under the Manage Websites tab in the WHS console (Fig 2).

When you now access your WHS homepage you should see the link (Fig 3), clicking on the link should open up the index.html file generated by Motherboard monitor, it’s not pretty (Fig 4), but it is informative.