Tentacle Software

Tim and Andrew from Using Windows Home Server have posted a video preview and walkthrough of Blackbox for Windows Home Server. Go check it out.

Big thanks to the WHS community for the great response to our CTP announcement for Blackbox. We’ve got our test team full for this initial round, but look out for more opportunities soon.

It’s that time again! Tentacle Software is looking for testers for our latest Windows Home Server Add-In, Blackbox for Windows Home Server. Blackbox for Windows Home Server provides in-depth real-time monitoring of motherboard, disk, UPS, and graphics card hardware sensors. Administrators can define alerting rules to take actions when a sensor exceeds a specified threshold.   This is a preview release of Blackbox and is intended to showcase the major features that will be present in the release version, and to give our users the opportunity to provide input on the final feature-set....

The Home Server Show is the best podcast in the world because it’s about my favourite subject: Windows Home Server! The boys have just recorded and released their 100th episode, and as part of the celebration we’re providing a super-secret coupon code to get 50% off Disk Management. We’ve also thrown five free licenses for Disk Management into the prize pool as well. You’ll need to hit the Home Server Show site to get the code. Hurry, the special is only going to last one week!

The We Got Served forums have a dedicated board for user-submitted ideas for Windows Home Server Add-Ins. I like to know what users think WHS is missing, so I keep an eye out for any new posts. Yesterday, Ron Levenberg posted an interesting request: I would love to be able to get a daily e-mail that confirms to me that all my PCs connected to my home server have been backed up successfully and, if not, which PCs don't have current backups. It could be something like the Computers & Backups page data. I don't...

I spent almost an entire day last week fighting with UTF-8 encoding and PayPal IPN integration with the Tentacle Software store. From a development perspective, I really like IPN. It lets your order processing workflow accept payment notifications from PayPal when a transaction is completed (not just standard purchases, but recurring payments and even any refunds that you issue), and it’s been pretty much rock solid since we launched Disk Management a couple of months ago. That was, of course, until the ordering process happened to send a non-ASCII character in a payment request to PayPal (an accented...

Björn Bürstinghaus has reviewed Disk Management 1.1 on his Windows blog: [Google Translation] The hard drives are, in my opinion the most important components of a home server, because there all data is stored centrally. Unfortunately, the Windows Home Server Console no native support for display of information on the built-in hard drives. With the add-in Disk Management for Windows Home Server Tentacle Software you have a perfect overview of the status and activities of the individual hard disks in your home server. Thanks Björn!

Intel have released new drivers (Intel Rapid Storage Technology Driver v9.6, previously known as Intel Matrix Storage Manager) for their desktop RAID controllers, and in some cases it appears that SCSI paths for disks attached to the controller are changing. A change in SCSI paths isn’t anything catastrophic, but it does mean that your Disk Management wireframe might need to be reconfigured. The wireframe tracks disk locations based on their SCSI path, and will highlight a drive bay in red if a particular path isn’t present anymore. If you update your disk controller drivers and some drive...

We’re into the second week of the Disk Management 1.1 release, and we’ve had lots of positive feedback so far. Here’s a selection of reviews and release announcements: UsingWindowsHomeServer.com Tentacle Software announced the release of their updated Disk Management Add-In this weekend and I spent an evening in “hard drive information overload” as I reviewed this sweet update to an already cool tool! Is this Add-In for me? Heck yeah. My parents? Not so much. This Add-In is well worth the $10 for any avid WHS user. Access...

Over at the Ignition Development blog, I’ve posted an article on the development of the content management and online store framework that runs Tentacle Software. The old Tentacle Software website wasn’t a looker by anyone’s standards; it functioned, in that it served HTML pages with text and links, but it was by no means a stunning piece of architecture. In fact, it was just a couple of raw HTML pages and some JavaScript. Foundation In the run-up to launching Disk Management, we redesigned the site using a free CSS template...