.NET Mobile Application for Remote Server Management

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.NET Mobile Application for Remote Server
Management

• Jing Ding
• Advisor Dr Chung-E Wang

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Outline

• Motivation
• Background
• Approaches, technologies involved
• Implementation Results
• Conclusions Future work

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Motivation

• For network administrators, it is very important
  to keep an eye on the networks performance from
  time to time.
• And in the case of there is problem with servers,
  they want to know immediately what is the cause,
  what can be done to quickly solve the problem.
• Sometimes when they are away on vacations, they
  dont have computers at hand. It would be nice if
  they can accomplish all above from a mobile
  device (cell phone etc.) without having to rush
  to a pc.

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Background

• Monitoring the health of a server is becoming
  extremely important for a networks performance.
• Proactive monitoring assists in early problem
  detection and low-impact resolution.
• With the popularity of wireless technology and
  networks, more functionalities can be built onto
  cell phones.
• .NET performance monitoring facilities and
  Windows Task Scheduler make it easy to implement
  this functionality.

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Technologies - MMIT

• Microsoft Mobile Internet Toolkit allows you to
  easily and quickly build powerful web
  applications that targets mobile devices.
• It is built onto .NET framework, and brings all
  the advantages of the Microsoft ASP.NET web
  development model to the mobile web applications.

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Technologies MMIT (Cont.)

• In addition, it offers following features
• Support for a variety of devices
• It allows you to target a large variety of mobile
  devices, from WML-based cell phones to the
  HTML-based Pocket PC.
• Write-once Web pages
• It provides a set of adaptive components that
  allow you to author a Web application once, and
  display that same application on any supported
  mobile device without further tweaking. The
  runtime even takes care of many of the
  implementation differences among browsers,
  devices, and gateways.

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Technologies MMIT (Cont.)

• World-class tool support
• It integrates fully into the Microsoft Visual
  Studio .NET , with its rich toolbox and designer,
  drag-and-drop server control support, automatic
  deployment, and a host of other features.
• Customizability and extensibility
• It provides the same customization and
  extensibility features as ASP.NET. In addition,
  the toolkit provides an extensibility model that
  allows support for other devices to be added,
  without requiring changes to application code.
  This ensures that the mobile Web applications you
  write today will easily be able to support new
  generations of devices in the future.

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Technologies Smartphone

• Microsoft Smartphone supports Visual Studio .NET,
  which makes it a the natural choice to be
  development environment in this application for
  the part of code that runs on the cell phone.

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Technologies Performance counter

• Performance counter is the mechanism by which
  Windows collects performance data on various
  system resources. Windows contains a pre-defined
  set of performance counters with which you can
  interact.
• Examples include counters that monitor a
  processors busy time, memory usage, connections,
  or the number of bytes received over a network
  connection.
• The .NET PerformanceCounter class allows you to
  both read and update performance counters.

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Technologies Task Scheduler

• Task Scheduler has been an extremely useful tool
  to administrators through Scheduled Tasks in the
  Control Panel (and the Scheduled Tasks folder in
  My computer).
• It can be used to schedule any script or program
  to be invoked at any time or regular intervals.
• The .NET TaskScheduler class allows you to
  execute scheduled tasks at the server.

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Summary of the Solution

• Secure the application with Windows
  Authentication
• Obtain and display the status of the server (read
  the chosen performance counter value)
• Disable or enable the server
• Execute any scheduled task or a script on the
  server

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Implementation Soft Back Keys
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Implementation Soft Back Keys

• Smartphone soft keys operate menus (OK Cancel)
• The Smartphone back key operates differently,
  depending on the context of the key press.
• Cancels modal dialog boxes (Always)
• Cancels shortcut menus (Always)
• Performs a backspace operation (When the focus is
  on an editable control, such as a text box, or on
  an editable custom control)

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Implementation

• Microsoft SmartPhone is used as client side
  platform to program on cell phone and execute
  code. Users can log in on the cell phone, view
  server status or select task to execute on the
  server. The program then sends http request to
  the server.
• On the server side, a program receives the
  request, and either look up the performance of
  this server, or execute the specific scheduled
  task on this server, then return the results back
  to be displayed on the cell phone.

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Implementation Screenshots
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Conclusions

• This project uses Microsoft Mobile Internet
  Toolkit (MMIT), Microsoft Smartphone, .NET
  Performance Counter classes and Windows Task
  Scheduler to develop a mobile application which
  allows you to manage your server via your cell
  phone from anywhere anytime you want.

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Future Work

• Future work can be done to display several other
  important performance counters.
• This project can be modified so it can work with
  a server farm.
• For better functionality, load balancing software
  can be used to manage load on a server farm. This
  application can be easily modified to work with
  such load balancing software.

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References

• http//samples.gotdotnet.com/MobileQuickStart/(5er
  oum55400qrk551thyzl55)/Default.aspx?urldoc/SdkFea
  tures.aspx
• http//samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/compactfra
  mework/doc/spkeys.aspx
• http//www.comptechdoc.org/os/windows/ntserverguid
  e/ntsperf.html
• http//www.codeproject.com/csharp/TSNewLib.aspSam
  ple20Code
• http//msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
  /library/en-us/dnppcgen/html/devmobfaq.asp

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Questions?