====================== SERVER STATUS WIDGET (PLASMOID) =========================

This widget allows you to monitor remote servers.


NEWS

Version 1.5 has it all: per server notifications, panel support and even a
french translation. More translations are always welcome! Also, I hope to have
some more detailed usage instructions in the Wiki soon.

Version 1.4 adds support for localization, i.e. translations! Obviously, the 
amount of languages I speak is rather limited, so I need your help! Please see
the Wiki at Gitorious (http://gitorious.org/serverstatuswidget) if you can help
out with translations.

Version 1.3 adds a new check method: run a custom command. It also fixes crashes
that may have occured when removing a server whose check was currently running.
In case your font settings stopped working, that's fixed, too.

Version 1.2 fixes the checks not starting when changing the check type of an
already active server and also sets some sane minimum sizes for widget when
doing the layout.

The 1.1 release is bugfix release. I was a little too quick releasing the 1.0
version, sorry for that. This version fixed all build errors, compatibility with
older versions of KDE and the status not changing on startup.

The 1.0 release is almost a complete rewrite. There really isn't much new 
functionality, but the configuration has improved substantially. I also hope 
that now the code has reached the point that one can easily build new features
without changing too much of the existing code.

That beeing said, feel free to report any issues you find (see FEEDBACK)!


INSTALLATION

There are some basic installation instructions in the INSTALL file.


FEEDBACK

You can contact the author (me) at ch@bitfehler.net, but for now feedback 
regarding the widget is best kept in comments on its kde-look.org page:
http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php/Server+Status+Widget?content=101336

In case you want to contribute a line of code or two, you might want to check
the Gitorious page: http://gitorious.org/serverstatuswidget

If there is enough interest I might try to move the plasmoid into KDE SVN.


TRANSLATIONS

If you would like to contribute a new translation, please check the wiki at
Gitorious. It is really easy.


USAGE

The widget is used to monitor remote servers. The original idea was to send one
or more pings to check if a given server is up. While that was a quick scratch
for an actual itch, there are many scenarios where a ping will not do the job.
Therefore, I have begun implementing different methods to check on a server.
In this release, there are 3 ways to check servers which can now be easily 
configured via the graphical configuration interface.

1) Ping

The original ping method. Check a server by pinging it. The Server will receive 
the configured number of pings in the configured interval. If _no_ reply is 
received, the server is considered down. If _at least one_ reply is received, 
the server is considered up. There is currently no way of dealing with high 
packet loss or such.

2) TCP connection

The other method available is to initiate a TCP connection to the configured 
port. This obviously monitors a service rather than a server. If the connection 
is accepted by the server, the server/service is considered up, else it is 
considered down. 

3) Run custom command

This method just runs a custom command. It could be anything, a custom ping
command, some script that does complex checks, whatever. A return value of
zero is interpreted as success, everything else as failure (standard UNIX
behaviour). Make sure you know what you are doing when you use this check
method.

Note that all methods may fail locally. In this case, the "warning" icon is 
used to indicate that something is wrong, but the server/service must not
neccessarily be down.
