My friend and fellow WHS MVP Donavon West from HomeServerHacks.com has just released a Windows Home Server Add-In of his own, called @WHSTweet.
Basically what this add-in does is use the Twitter network to send health notifications about your Windows Home Server. So anytime work health notifications are updated, such as a hard drive about to fail, you will get a Tweet about it.
Now I use Twitter to post whenever a new article appears on UsingWindowsHomeServer, so I already see the benefit of using Twitter for more than just the usual thing of telling people what you are doing. You can follow me by the way by following aedney.
As Donovan suggests, you wont want to use your existing Twitter account as it is pretty likely that your friends will not be interested in the status of your Windows Home Server, so create a new one, and then have your main Twitter account follow it. So that is what I did. If you want to create your own, go to www.twitter.com and create an account.
INSTALLATION
Once you have downloaded the add-in, and it is very small (well done Donavon), you have to copy it over to your Windows Home Server. Rather than put that information in this review, take a look at the How To… guide I wrote on installing add-ins by clicking here. The add-in will appear in the available Add-Ins area as @WHSTweet, again, follow the guide to select it and install it.
CONFIGURING @WHSTweet
So now that the add-in is installed, you need to do a little bit of configuration to get it work, nothing much though so it will be quick.
Click on the Settings button – you will then see the @WHSTweet add-in shown in the left column. Click it to open the settings tab.
You will need to enter the username and password for the new Twitter account you created.
In order to test that you have entered the correct account details, click the Test Tweet button.
If all goes well you will see a congratulations message in your WHS Console.
You will also get a Tweet.
You will also notice on the settings page that there are three boxes in an area called Twitter Options. These are:
Include Server Name – If you have more than one Windows Home Server you may want to know which one caused the notification. Checking Include Server Name will prefix every tweet with the name of the server. This will allow you to use one twitter account for all of your servers.
Ignore Warnings – Check Ignore Warnings and you will only be alerted for critical health notifications (i.e. ignore yellow warnings such as “New Add-In ready to Install”.
Enable Tweets – If you ever want to temporarily disable health status tweets (eg: you are doing maintenance on your WHS and don’t want the tweets to go out) you can do so by unchecking Enable Tweets.
Select which options you want to use (by default all but the Include Server Name are selected for you).
And that is it – simple eh?
Ok, so you might want to test that it is working other than by sending a test tweet. So, you have two options. Option 1, do something to your WHS to make an alert appear. Well ok, you probably don’t want to do something like that. So Donavon has come up with an alternative. This option 2 is called Fake Error, that little button above the Test Tweet button. If you press it to simulate a critical health problem using the WHS APIs.
The simulated error looks like any other health problem to WHS and to the @WHSTweet service, thus it is sent out just like any other error condition. @WHSTweet will remove the simulated error, simulating that you resolved the error in 60 seconds so don’t worry.
And that is it – now you can get your WHS Health Notifications wherever you are without the need to log into the WHS.
Excellent work Donavon!
To download @WHSTweet, click here and then click the Download button.
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