Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
A few minutes ago I posted what I hope will be the last beta of the “beta 4” series of Home Server SMART 2012/WindowSMART 2012. I hope this irons out the last of the “serious stuff” before I move into what I would (ideally) like to be the last major changes before moving into release candidate status. Beta 4c, v2.2.3.17, is now available. The following bugs/issues were fixed for this build:
- User-reported issue of not seeing any data for any disk – turned out to be a bug in the C++ library I wrote. Data was not getting copied to the IDENTIFY_DEVICE structure because the code that did the copying was on the wrong side of a curly brace, so it was copying in most, but not all, circumstances where it should have been copied.
- Some SSDs showed an overall status of Healthy in the SMART Status, but there was a message in the window that said the status was warning. This occurred on SandForce-based SSDs that did not have a Life Curve Status attribute.
- In WindowSMART clicking the Quick Help button resulted in “Exceptions were detected loading the help file” message. This was because there was no help file to load. A help file has been written and now loads.
- Clicking the Documentation button displayed the About HSS or About WindowSMART dialogue. This now displays a real CHM help file. In Home Server SMART, the WindowSMART content is displayed (despite the file being named HomeServerSMART.chm). There is a lot remaining to be written, particularly for the BitLocker piece. The WindowSMART documentation is pretty much done. I’m going to have my father-in-law review it for guffaws; he is a wordsmith and should be able to clean up any grammatical no-no’s.
- Made some changes to the Settings dialogue to clean up irregular behavior with the Save/Cancel buttons; added an Apply button to WindowSMART settings so you can save the settings and still keep the dialogue open. Added a prompt to inform users changing the debug log setting requires a service restart. (Note that debug logging cannot be disabled during the beta).
- Corrected some WMI retrieval code that would fail to complete correctly in Windows XP and Server 2003 – two items (Serial Number and Media Type) are not supported in the Win32_DiskDrive WMI class prior to Vista.
- Other minor changes, tweaks.
So what’s next? Covering the remaining SSDs is the big one. Samsung, Micron, JMicron and SMART Modular Technologies are the remaining four SSD controller manufacturers that have not yet been covered. Making some fixes to the BitLocker code in HSS also needs to be done. It’s probably going to be a good week at least before a new beta is released, unless folks report back serious problems with this one. If all goes according to plan, the next beta will be Beta 5. Depending on how testing goes in the beta 5 series, there could be a beta 6. Otherwise, I would like to move to RC status.
I’m hoping to reach RC status in April with a Gold release in May. Please don’t hesitate to report problems to me, either by email or at the bug tracking site.
Home Server SMART: http://dojonorthsoftware.net/w/index.ph ... SMART_2012
WindowSMART: http://dojonorthsoftware.net/w/index.ph ... SMART_2012
Best regards,
Matt