.NET Mobile Application for Remote Server Management

1. .NET Mobile Application for Remote Server Management Jing Ding Advisor: Dr Chung-E Wang

2. Outline • Motivation • Background • Approaches, technologies involved • Implementation & Results • Conclusions & Future work

3. Motivation • For network administrators, it is very important to keep an eye on the network’s 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 don’t 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.

4. Background • Monitoring the health of a server is becoming extremely important for a network’s 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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 processor’s 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.

10. 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.

11. 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

12. Implementation – Soft & Back Keys

13. 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)

14. 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.

15. Implementation – Screenshots

20. 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.

21. 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.

22. References • http://samples.gotdotnet.com/MobileQuickStart/(5eroum55400qrk551thyzl55)/Default.aspx?url=doc/SdkFeatures.aspx • http://samples.gotdotnet.com/quickstart/compactframework/doc/spkeys.aspx • http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/windows/ntserverguide/ntsperf.html • http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/TSNewLib.asp#Sample%20Code • http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnppcgen/html/devmobfaq.asp

23. Questions?