UD Monitor user manual
About this manual
Originally written by Gliuck and Rob on Tuesday May 27th, 2003. With corrections and additions by RM. Last modified: see the date/time at the bottom of this page.
This manual was written by an enthusiastic user of UD Monitor. It is not intended
as an official documentation for the UD Agent software, nor it is endorsed or
supported by United Devices in any way.
If you will find any inconsistencies between anything written in this manual and
the software behaviour, please contact UD Monitor's author(RM).
Introduction
The purpose of this document is to provide a user guide to the use of UD Monitor.
UD Monitor is a third-party utility designed to work in conjunction with UD Agent to provide additional features — such as caching, backup, monitoring and logging. It is widely spread among UD Agent users, and proves itself useful on many occasions, and especially during server outages.
As of version 3.00, UD Monitor also supports Folding@Home - a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. F@h support does not affect/hinder/interfere with the UD "part" of the program in any way. Read more about how to set up UD Monitor with Folding@home...
The intended audience for this document is made up of end users, no technical
explanations are given.
A big amount of useful information can be found also in the FAQ's (English
or Italian version) or on the UD
forum, where a dedicated thread exists, and many users, along with the author,
can provide answers to your questions.
Running UD Monitor
The user interface is quite simple, yet complete. Thus, an overview of main controls is presented before dealing with the setting in detail.
The windows the user is presented with are four: the Main
window, the Cache window, the Backup
window and the Log window. Other windows may be opened by pressing
buttons on each of them. The windows share four buttons, which are examined in
detail in the Common buttons section. Unlike the Settings
window, the main window can be resized by dragging its borders with the mouse.
Main window
The main window enables you to keep control of what's happening in UD Monitor:
- It tells you if the UD Agent is running.
- If the Agent is running, the "Stop" enables you to stop it; if it's not running, you have a "Run" button to launch it.
- It gives you information about the save history of the current WU (last save time, elapsed time since, number of saves seen by UD monitor since launched).
- It tells you the WU number, the date when the WU was downloaded from the server, and also tries to guess what protein the UD Agent is currently working on.
- If backups are enabled (i.e., if the backup tab is visible), it shows the latest backup time and enables you to immediately force a backup.
A pop-up menu can be opened by right clicking on the information frame. It shows the last WU save time and offers you some actions, from top to bottom:
- Minimize the UD Monitor window.
- Open the "After next save" submenu. The submenu lets you choose an action to be performed immediately after the next save of the current WU. Options are:
- Stop the client: stops WU elaboration.
- Send/receive: performs a "send/receive". See also the cache window section.
- Shutdown: shuts the PC down. Useful in order not to lose computation time by turning the PC off at the wrong moment.
- Reboot: same as Shutdown, but performs a reboot instead.
- Log off: same as above, but it just logs the user off.
- Stop the UD Agent.
- Force an immediate backup (if backup is enabled).
- Quit UD Monitor.
Cache window
The cache window keeps track of the caches' status.
A list of the cache slots, with their content (protein name or result), its size and its download/completion time (as appropriate) is shown.
The current cache slot is the one with the '->'
arrow on its left.
You can enable or disable the caching by clicking on the "Use cache" checkbox on top of the window.
If the "Use cache" checkbox is checked, several actions are possible from this window (a pop-up menu can be opened by right-clicking the pane as shown in the picture):
- You can switch to a different cache slot by clicking it with the mouse and pressing enter, or double-clicking it. After a few seconds, the arrow will move to show that slots have been switched.
- You can tell UD Monitor to switch to the oldest slot according to the download date and time. The shortcut key for this action is F4.
- You can refresh the window's content, making it up to date. The shortcut key for this action is F5. UD Monitor refreshes this window automatically when important changes occur, so you probably won't need to use this function.
- You can do a "send/receive". This action makes UD Monitor cycle through the slots containing a result and send the results back to server, downloading fresh WU's. This action may take several minutes even on fast machines with good network connection. The shortcut key for this action is F12.
- You can create a new (empty) cache slot. The shortcut key for this action is Ins. After switching to the slot for the first time, you'll be asked to enter your username and password in order to register a new Device with the UD Server.
- You can delete a cache slot. The shortcut key for this action is Del.
- You can reset a slot. That forces the slot to be emptied.
- You can disable a slot. The disabled slot will not be used for WU crunching, but the UD Agent installation present in it is not affected in any way. You can re-enable the slot by selecting this option again.
- You can set the properties of the font used in the window.
Backup window (hidden by default)
Early versions of UD Agent had a bug which led to file corruption each time when computer "crashed", resulting either in processing the same WU from scratch, or downloading a new WU, without returning results of the previous one.
UD Monitor enables you to keep backup images of the WU in order to restore them in such cases. With latest UD Agent versions, such problems have almost completely disappeared, so there is no real need to use the backup facility provided by UD Monitor. You can read more about this in the "Backup" section of the FAQ.
The backup window enables you to control the backup plan and current situation.
In the list box on top left, the list of current backups is shown, along with their date and time and, if caching is enabled, the slot they come from in parentheses.
On the right, the controls let you specifiy backup options:
- The first one, "Keep xxx backups", lets you specify the number of backups to keep. Type a number in the box and/or use the arrows to change it.
- The second and the third ones, listed under "Auto-backup every..." let you specify the backup plan: by number of saves or by time. Check either one (checking both is also possible), and specify the number of saves or minutes after which a WU should be backed up.
On the bottom, three buttons appear:
- Backup: immediately forces a backup.
- Restore: restores the selected backup.
- Crop: useful if you've just reduced the "Keep xxx backup" number, deletes oldest backups leaving just as many as you specified.
You can change the font properties of the list box by right-clicking on it and choosing "Font...".
Important notice: this tab is hidden by default starting from version 2.00 of UD Monitor, so you will not possibly see it. Please refer to the Settings - Interface for instructions on how to make it visible.
Log window
The log window keeps track of all slots' activity, and logs them along with date and time.
A pop-up menu can be opened by right-clicking on the list box:
- Save...: lets you save the log in a text file of your choice.
- Copy selected: copies the selected log item to the clipboard.
- Copy all: copies all the log items to the clipboard.
- Clear: clears the log.
- Font...: lets you specifiy the font used in the log box.
Common buttons
All the four windows described above show the same four buttons in the bottom part:
- Logs...: a pop-up-menu will appear, enabling you to:
- Browse the WU completion log by choosing "WU completions".
- Browse the miscellaneous log by choosing "All events".
- Close the pop-up itself by choosing "Cancel".
- About...: shows the About box, with version information, program description and links to UD Monitor's homepage and its author's E-Mail.
- Settings...: Opens the Settings window.
- Minimize: minimizes UD Monitor.
Tray icon
The tray icon, looking like a small bottle in your system tray (the area in Windows taskbar next to the clock, generally positioned on the screen bottom right) provides you a large amount of information:
- If the bottle's color is blue, then UD Agent recently saved its work on the WU; if it's yellow, the yellow save-time warning timeout has expired since last save; if it's red, the red save-time warning timeout has expired since last save. Please refer to Settings - Interface for specifying the timeouts.
- Hovering your mouse over it, a tooltip text (not shown in the picture) appears, displaying the time of last save and time elapsed since.
- Right-clicking on it, a context menu appears providing you with the following options (basically the same seen in the main window popup menu). It shows the last WU save time and offers you some actions, from top to bottom:
- Restore the UD Monitor window.
- Open the "After next save" submenu. The submenu lets you choose an action to be performed immediately after the next save of the current WU. Possibilities are:
- Stop the client: stops WU elaboration.
- Send/receive: performs a "send/receive" action. See also the cache window section.
- Shutdown: shut the PC down. Useful in order not to lose computation time by turning the PC off at the wrong moment.
- Reboot: same as Shutdown, but performs a reboot instead.
- Log off: same as above, but it just logs the user off.
- Stop the UD Agent.
- Force an immediate backup (if backup is enabled).
- Quit UD Monitor.
Settings
The settings window can be opened by pressing the "Settings..." button from any application window. It has six tabs, allowing you to set different categories of options: General, UD Agent, Interface, Actions, Cache exhaustion and Logs. All windows have an "OK" button to commit changes and a "Cancel" button to discard them.
General
In this tab, you can configure the general options which rule the behaviour of the UD Monitor application.
- Starting from the top, there is a textbox labelled "UD.exe location", which must contain the path of the UD.exe executable. It can be found in the directory you specified upon installation. Either type the path in or click the button to the right to browse for the correct path.
- Then, you can see a couple of checkboxes, labelled "Run on start" and "Stop on exit". If you check the first one, the Agent will start as you launch UD Monitor; if you check the second, the Agent will be stopped when exiting UD Monitor.
- The checkbox labelled "Send result before cache auto-switch", if checked, causes UD Monitor to let the Agent send the result back to the server before switching slots.
- The "communication timeout" box specifies how long UD Monitor will wait while UD Agent communicates with the server before assuming a failure and terminating it. It should be set to at least 5 minutes for fast connections (LAN, ADSL, ...) and to at least 10 for dial-up modem connections.
UD Agent
In this tab, you can specify how UD Monitor should interact with the Agent.
- The first checkbox determines whether UD Monitor should use the so-called "forced" program termination in stopping the client. Forced termination (equivalent to killing the process with Windows Task Manager) is faster but less safe than the normal one (equivalent to closing an application by clicking on the "X" button in its top right), so this checkbox should be left unchecked unless problems in shutting down the client appear.
- The second checkbox, labelled "Detect aborted WUs", if ticked, makes UD Monitor distinguish correctly completed WUs and aborted ones (e.g. due to a timeout), logging them differently.
- If the "Use protein detection fix" checkbox is checked, UD Monitor will delete old protein files on WU completions. This should make it recognize correctly the protein the Agent is working on, but WU downloads will take longer time, also putting more load on the UD's server. Therefore, this option is not recommended.
- The "Detect current protein by date/time of file's" dropdown list allows to choose the criterion UD Monitor should use to determine which protein is the current one. You can try each of them and choose the one that suits you best. More info about this is in the FAQ.
- The "Store backups in" textbox lets you specify a directory in which WU backups (see also Backup window) will be stored. It's OK to leave it empty, as UD Monitor will use a default location in that case.
Interface
The interface tab specifies many options conditioning UD Monitor's interface.
The top of the window shows two frames:
- In the frame called "Save-time warnings" you can set the timeouts (with respect to last save) that make the application icon (the blue flask appearing in the system tray) change its color to yellow then red. Set these times to something just above and far above your average save interval (or a time you think should be "normal" save interval) respectively.
- The frame called "Visible tabs" lets you choose which ones among the Cache window, the Backup window and the Log window should be available. Check and uncheck at your own ease. "Backup" is unchecked by default at installation.
Below the frames there are miscellaneous controls specifying:
- "Always on top": If UD Monitor should always stay on top of other application windows.
- "Minimize on startup": If the application should be minimized when started.
- "Minimize to tray": If minimization should send the window to the
system tray (with no icons on the taskbar then). In this case, the following option
make sense:
- "...on window close": pressing the "X" button on top right will not close the application, just minimize it. To shut it down, right-click the icon in the system tray and choose "Exit"
- "...on tray icon click": if the UD Monitor window is open and you click (or double click, see following option) on the tray icon, it will be minimized.
- "...and require double click to restore": a double click is needed on the tray icon to minimize or restore the window. A single click is enough if unchecked.
Actions
In this window, you can set up files (such as applications or multimedia) to be run when given events happen. A common choice for them is sound files, such as WAV files. You can get lots of free sound files at A1 Free Sound Effects.
You can set up an action for any of these four events:
- WU Completion: the file is run when a WU is completed.
- Yellow save-time warning: the file is run when the tray icon turns yellow (see Settings - Interface for timeout settings).
- Red save-time warning: the file is run when the tray icon turns red (see Settings - Interface for timeout settings).
- Back-to-blue notification: the file is run when the tray icon turns back to blue after being yellow or red (when the UD Agents saves work).
Type a path in the textbox or use the "..." button on the right to browse for a file.
Clicking on the label above every textbox will run the file for test.
You can disable all actions at once (for instance, at night) by checking the "Disable all" checkbox.
Cache exhaustion
In this window you can specify which actions should be taken when the elaboration in all cache slots has been completed.
You have serveral options:
- The first control (enabled if checkbox checked) lets you choose from a drop-down
menu whether to:
- Shutdown Windows
- Reboot computer
- Log off
- The second one (enabled if checkbox checked) lets you choose a program to be run at cache exhaustion. Type in its full path or browse for it by pressing the "Browse..." button. You can test if the program will start by using the "Test" button.
- Stop UD Agent: if checked, the UD Agent will be stopped at cache exhaustion.
- Close UD Monitor: if checked, UD Monitor will be stopped at cache exhaustion.
Logs
In this window you can control how events are logged by UD Monitor. There are two sections:
- Event log: lists all events seen by UD Monitor (saves, cache switchings, startups and shutdowns, backups and so on). There are two controls available:
- Enable: the log is produced only if this checkbox is checked
- Clear on startup: if checked, the log is purged and started anew when UD Monitor is launched.
- WU log: all WU's (completed or aborted) are listed in this log, along with date and time and protein type.There is just one control available:
- Enable: the log is produced only if this checkbox is checked.