Networks

VBSys can now be used to monitor network shared drives that are mapped to a drive letter.

It's success at monitoring drives over different types of network varies but if your network is compatible with the Standard Microsoft Networking and Windows it should work.

If VBSys has problems with your Network Drives, then unfortunately there is nothing that can be done to change that. Simply, disable the Network Drive Monitoring and use VBSys to monitor all your Local Hard Drives. (VBSys uses the built into Windows method of reading drives)

Some uses for Network Monitoring:

If you are in a small group of 2 or 3 computers and share disk space then you may want to monitor all the drives you are using.

If you are in charge of a Network, then you might want to monitor the other computers drives.

If you are on a Network and are going to copy files to a Network Drive, you may want to temporarily check the drive for space and then deselect it when done.

Click O for the Options Window. If VBSys can detect network drives then they will show up. Select all the drives you want to monitor, (Up to 10in VBSys, 6 in VBSysBar), and then click the "Change" button. (Save later if you want to save settings)

If you connect to a shared directory on a drive, it will display the space on the entire drive. So you need to only monitor 1 drive or directory for each drive.

The network drive will update every 10th timer cycle only.

(This is to keep network use at a minimum. So if you have the standard timer updating every 9 seconds, the network drives will try to update every 90 seconds.)

The network drive letters are displayed with underlined lettering to identify them as network drives.

Disable Network Monitoring

On the Option Window there is a checkbox to Disable Net Drives from being able to be selected. When you click Change, this settings is saved to the registry file. Remember to still save settings without the network drives being monitored though so the network drives will not reappear next time VBSys is started if they were saved showing previously.

Note to Network Administrator:
To completely disable the network drives from being able to be selected by a user and hide the checkbox:
Manually edit the Registry file to change the "Enabled" setting in the [Net] section of the VBSys program to read Enabled=2
(To re-enable being able to select network drives, the same setting will need to be manually changed back to a 0 or 1) E-Mail me if you need assistance with this.

VBSys Network Troubleshooting

If the network drives just never show up, then unfortunately there is just an incompatibility with the way this program reads the network and nothing can be done to fix it.

Different space remaining displays indicate different things.

FREE

Means that the display is still in it's initial state and just hasn't been updated yet.

VBSys is in no rush to start updates as it always yields to EVERYTHING else so it doesn't effect system or network performance. No problem, just be patient.

X

Means that VBSys can NOT read the network drive. Sometimes this happens just due to network traffic. If it stays that way for more than a few minutes, then you should go to the options window and deselect that drive.

VBSys does not try that hard, if it gets an initial reading that indicates a poor connection or a problem it won't even try to do the update until the next timer cycle in order to not effect system or network performance.

XXX

This indicates that VBSys thinks everything is OK, but in reality it can't read your network drive. This can occur if the remote computer exits windows but is still on the network or your computer tries to automatically share on startup but the other computer is not on the network. If this happens, the initial attempt by VBSys to read the drive did negatively affect performance for a few seconds. VBSys changed the indication to the XXX so it won't effect system performance again and it will NOT try to update the drive again at all. You should deselect that drive since it is not updating anyway.

If you want to try that drive again then select it again from the Options Window; (Even if it is still showing.)

Always check with whoever is responsible for the network to get permission to monitor drives over the network. This should have the very smallest impact on the network possible but you should still check.