ServerStats — the Server Status dashboard widget greets Linux

Server Status is a dashboard widget found in every Mac OS X Leopard installation that allows you to remotely connect to a server and see CPU, network and disk usage (see Mac OS X Server product page)

This patch makes adjustments for it to be suitable for any kind of servers by modifying its connection transport from a closed source ObjC plugin to a plain HTTP interface.

That only requires you to run an agent on the target server to gather the statistics. In the agent/ subdirectory you will find such an agent for a typical Linux installation (currently tested only on Debian Lenny). You will need to have ruby installed along with some gems listed in the comments on the top of the script.

Installation

1. On the server: make sure you have sysstat installed on your server. Also install ruby and rubygems. Then copy the agent/ directory to a place of your choice and run it with a supplied start script.

2. On the client: go to /dashboard_patch and issue install.sh command. That will make a copy of your /Library/Widgets/Server Status.wdgt, add a bunch of new files to it and apply a patch. A newly created dashboard widget will appear in the same directory called ServerStats.wdgt. Then just open it using Finder, and you will be prompted to install the new widget.

Security

The widget supports basic authorization (a login and a password), but you will need to enable that on the server yourself using a proxy server such as nginx, apache or lighttpd. In my nginx config, I have a server running on port 8018 that checks basic auth and then proxy_passes to localhost:8818, where the agent is running.

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