Plugin: SageAlert

[sleonard]

Originally Posted by wayner

I tried it and it seems to be working well - I am using Twitter and email notifications. It is even co-existing with SageTweet right now.

I would suggest that you use a different methodology for selecting multpile servers for messages - perhaps check boxes rather than Ctrl-clicking to select multiple items. The Ctrl-clicking is not that obvious to people.

I agree. If I hadn't seen wayner's post I wouldn't have figured it out at all. Even now, I find it confusing.

I just saw the email address listed and thought everything had been auto selected and have trying to figure out both how to remove the notifications I don't want and why I wasn't recieving any notifications at all.

What's more you can just regular-click to select but need to ctrl-click to deselect.

S

[sleonard]

OK, I definately don't understand how select and de-select which servers get the alerts. If I open the Alerts tab and click the configure link for any of the various alerts I get a pop-up showing my email address. I can click or ctrl-click to highlight in blue and only ctrl-click to remove the highlight. No matter whether it is highlighted or not I still get an email.

S

[wayner]

I am having the opposite problem - I cannot stop emails! There is definitely an issue with stopping alerts to a specified server - I have deleted a TO: address from SageAlert but that address is still getting emails.

S - Are you sure everything is configured properly?

[sleonard]

No, I am getting every type of alert sent to my email/SMS gateway and I cannot stop any of them. I only have a single email address configured, no tweet, no growl. I only want alerts for System Notifications, Recording Conflicts, and Low Space but I am getting alerts for everything.

Strange since I didn't get any alerts for the first day. After using the ctrl-click to make sure that only the alerts I wanted were highlighted I started getting all the alerts and now can't stop them.

S

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

I am having the opposite problem - I cannot stop emails! There is definitely an issue with stopping alerts to a specified server - I have deleted a TO: address from SageAlert but that address is still getting emails.

S - Are you sure everything is configured properly?

Originally Posted by sleonard

No, I am getting every type of alert sent to my email/SMS gateway and I cannot stop any of them. I only have a single email address configured, no tweet, no growl. I only want alerts for System Notifications, Recording Conflicts, and Low Space but I am getting alerts for everything.

Strange since I didn't get any alerts for the first day. After using the ctrl-click to make sure that only the alerts I wanted were highlighted I started getting all the alerts and now can't stop them.

S

Stop Sage, delete (or rename) sagealert.sqlite (this will delete all your current settings), edit sagealert.log4j.properties and change the debug settings from INFO to TRACE and from FATAL to TRACE in the two spots in that file and save it, restart Sage, reconfigure your alerts as to reproduce the issues you're seeing, send me sagealert.log.

Deleting an account (email/twitter/growl) from it's tab should definitely wipe it from all alerts, etc. I tested that rather thoroughly and am unable to reproduce here right now. I'll look deeper sometime tomorrow, but in addition to the logs, a step by step on what you did to make it happen (from a fresh install/sqlite db file) would also be very helpful.

Originally Posted by sleonard

OK, I definately don't understand how select and de-select which servers get the alerts. If I open the Alerts tab and click the configure link for any of the various alerts I get a pop-up showing my email address. I can click or ctrl-click to highlight in blue and only ctrl-click to remove the highlight. No matter whether it is highlighted or not I still get an email.

S

I'd blame this more on the browser's implementation of a multi-select list box, but either way I'll accept responsibility for changing it. Besides, I was leaning towards a change anyway to a matrix with check boxes. I think that's what someone was describing above? That's my vision anyway.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

I am having the opposite problem - I cannot stop emails! There is definitely an issue with stopping alerts to a specified server - I have deleted a TO: address from SageAlert but that address is still getting emails.

S - Are you sure everything is configured properly?

If it's not too late, can I get the sagealert.sqlite db file in its current state (where you've deleted email accounts, but alerts are still being sent to the email account)? WARNING: If you have twitter or growl accounts configured in SageAlert and/or you have an SMTP server with id/pwd setup, then the id and passwords for those accounts are stored in plain text inside that database file.

[Slugger]

Ok... so another example of why you don't deliver code changes just prior to going away for the weekend.

Snapshot 532 contains a bunch of fixes (and an enhancement or two) from the last build, namely:

• Removing a server from an alert will now actually stop sending the alert to that server
• Deleting a server will now actually stop sending previously registered alerts to that server
• Fix various bugs with email notification servers (including a rather nasty memory leak, but unless you register hundreds or thousands of email addresses then it really isn't an issue, but it's fixed now)
• Add new event manager visual viewer: visiting url /sagealert/view_mgr will show the realtime status of the event manager (i.e. what servers are attached to what events); will help with future debugging w/o the need to get user's sqlite db file
• Email notifications: Prefix "SageAlert: " to email subjects

Keep the feedback/testing coming. Obviously bug reports are priority, but I'm now also looking for feedback on how to change the alerts tab to make it easier for people to setup their alerts. Instead of all the list boxes does a big matrix make more sense? Or make a separate list of checkboxes per alert? I definitely agree that a change needs to be made, but not sure exactly which is the best way to go.

[razrsharpe]

My wishlist:

• Alert setup: A big matrix makes sense to me with the alerts down the left side and notification types (twitter, email, etc) across the top.
• Top-Left or Top-Center justify the UI in the browser window. Then the tabs across the top will ALWAYS be in the same place. I find the center-center justification of the window annoying to navigate across tabs when they are always changing position on me
• Send Test Alert button
• When the notification has a date/time use the full date (DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS) and not just the time.

[Slugger]

Snapshot 533 now available:

* More alert handler manager fixes (logic errors corrected)

* Add ability to test notification servers

* UI fixes; ensure tabs remain in static location; prevent edit of active email addresses

[HuMan321]

We just unzip the new snapshop over the top of the old one?
Does Sage need to be shutdown?
Does the older version of SageAlert need to be shutdown to upgrade?
Thanks

[Slugger]

Just unzip over the old one, nothing needs to be stopped/restarted/etc. Unzipping the new one will trigger a restart of the app automatically - one of the big advantages of Jetty.

[darcilicious]

On Vista, eventually it seems that SageAlert disappears -- when I try to access it via the web page I get this silliness:

Directory: /sagealert/
WEB-INF/ 0 bytes Sep 14, 2009 7:40:24 PM

And this just after stopping the sagetv servic, installing the .533 release, and restarting the sagetv service.

Is there a workaround / fix for this?

(But SageAlert is still working fine, it's still sending messages to Twitter)

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by darcilicious

On Vista, eventually it seems that SageAlert disappears -- when I try to access it via the web page I get this silliness:

Directory: /sagealert/
WEB-INF/ 0 bytes Sep 14, 2009 7:40:24 PM

And this just after stopping the sagetv servic, installing the .533 release, and restarting the sagetv service.

Is there a workaround / fix for this?

(But SageAlert is still working fine, it's still sending messages to Twitter)

I configure the apps to expand the war and run it from a temp directory, it appears you have something that's cleaning up your system's temp directory periodically and hence the reason you end up with a dir listing. Indeed, the daemon threads that poll for and fire the events will run fine, but, of course, the configuration stuff is missing. The best fix here is to prevent whatever is cleaning up your system temp dir from running (the system temp dir should really only be wiped on system boot up, if it's to be wiped at all). If you can't do that, then you could change the context file to have the app expanded in jetty's webapps dir instead. You'll have to do this manually, as I won't make it the default since file locking issues are much more likely to occur using this method, which, in turn, makes the hot deploy functionality of Jetty inoperable on Windows.

To expand to a dir in webapps, open the SageAlert.context.xml file and comment out the line referring to "copyWebDir" then save the file. But, as I said above, I'd really look to preventing your temp dir from being wiped out since modding the context file will prevent hot deploys from working.

[sleonard]

Suggestion: On the settings tab, for each of the "Amount of time between each run ..." allow setting to 0 to disable that particular monitor thread. I don't need alerts from the UI or Recording Monitor threads so no need to keep them running.

Of course, if they don't use enough resources to bother with this then, well, don't.

Also, in the latest .533 snapshot the error message that says "Must be an integer between 1 and 15 doesn't stay on the screen more than a barely noticable flash.

S

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by sleonard

Suggestion: On the settings tab, for each of the "Amount of time between each run ..." allow setting to 0 to disable that particular monitor thread. I don't need alerts from the UI or Recording Monitor threads so no need to keep them running.

Of course, if they don't use enough resources to bother with this then, well, don't.

They don't, so I won't. A more complete answer would be that all the threads are initialized in the ServletContextListener when the app is initialized by Jetty and I decided to make it a hard rule that no other section of the app will start/restart monitor threads and since the threads spend the vast majority of their lives sleeping and what little work they do, especially with no listeners attached to them, is negligible I'll just always keep them running, in case you change your mind later on and want those alerts. If you want to minimize what little resource strain those threads do put on the system (which really is near zero), then increase the time between the runs to the maximum value allowed (which I assume you've already done).

Also, in the latest .533 snapshot the error message that says "Must be an integer between 1 and 15 doesn't stay on the screen more than a barely noticable flash.

S

Yeah, the library I'm using to validate is not really production quality and there are definitely problems with it. I actually wrote the library, but don't really want to maintain it/fix it so I'm looking for alternatives. Something will be done at some point.

[darcilicious]

Originally Posted by Slugger

But, as I said above, I'd really look to preventing your temp dir from being wiped out since modding the context file will prevent hot deploys from working.

Interesting. This is a pretty darn vanilla Vista SP2 system, freshly installed in mid-July just for SageTV and the HD-PVR. I haven't installed anything special to go around cleaning up stuff automatically. Assuming we're talking about C:\Windows\Temp, the last time anything was saved to that directory was 9/14 2:21a (and there's a ton of stuff in there) but I installed .533 at 7:40p...

There are these two related-looking folders, for example:

Jetty_0_0_0_0_8888_SageTweet.war__sagetweet__.t9sjrd
Jetty_0_0_0_0_8888_SageTweet.war__sagetweet__.t9sjrd_3442837910862534095

Dated 8/30 and 8/2 respectively.

Other things for me to investigate?

Edited to add: Okay, just remembered that I'm running the SageTV service as an admin user (in order to have access to network shares); the temp folder for that admin user is showing a BUNCH of SaeAlert.war__ files, the last two both dated 9/14/2009, and one minute apart.... So they're not getting deleted at any rate.

[Slugger]

What about the contents of the folder? Based on what Jetty is showing, it would seem the folder is still there, but everything inside of it is being deleted.

[wayner]

One other suggestion would be to "remember" all clients that have ever connected to the server. That way you could list clients that are currently connected or have been connected in the past and you can set up aliases without having to go and turn an extender on.

I like your matrix idea regarding setting up notifications. One additional notification method for those of us using WHS would be to trigger a WHS alert, assuming that apps other than WHS can do that. This would instantly show up on all PCs on one's LAN.

ps - I haven't had a chance to try the last two releases as I have been out of town.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by wayner

One other suggestion would be to "remember" all clients that have ever connected to the server. That way you could list clients that are currently connected or have been connected in the past and you can set up aliases without having to go and turn an extender on.

This should already be happening. Once SageAlert detects a PC client or extender/placeshifter it registers it and that registration is never deleted. It can get confusing with PC clients in the case where they have a dynamic IP and that IP changes since the same PC client would end up being registered multiple times under different IPs. But extenders/placeshifters are registered by mac address so that should always be constant.

I like your matrix idea regarding setting up notifications. One additional notification method for those of us using WHS would be to trigger a WHS alert, assuming that apps other than WHS can do that. This would instantly show up on all PCs on one's LAN.

ps - I haven't had a chance to try the last two releases as I have been out of town.

I'm starting to lean back towards the way it is now except replacing the list boxes with checkboxes. I like the matrix idea, but there's no way to display it in a decent manner. Since the text of each column heading can vary greatly in width, the grid will look horrible. Still haven't made a final decision on this one though.

[jsonnabend]

Slugger, thanks so much for a fantastic, useful plugin.

My $.02: add ability to post the information to a webserver.

- Jeff