Princess and the ClearOS Module - Part 1 of 4

Ever have the feeling "ClearOS is good piece of software...maybe even great. I just wish it had __________".  All around the world, in 22 different languages, I'm sure the ending to that sentence has been completed with an equally broad range of functions - from running a media server used for streaming music and movies to your TV to cooking up a corn-beef on rye. For those that are interested, the former is coming soon while the latter...well, maybe never and definitely not from me...I'm not a big fan of the salted beef.

At any rate, I had this exact feeling over the weekend when I started wondering how I managed to fill up a 140 GB hard disk drive on my ClearOS server at home.  Seems the combination of having two girls under the age of 5 has a rather exponential effect of disk space usage with:

a) the number of digital photos of the two of them growing up (Doh! I had to buy the 15.1 megapixel model)

b) the astounding number of princess movies one can downlo....ahem, collect

But I digress, and I'm only going to get myself into copyright trouble. I know about Bash's "du" using a wack of parameters and possibly having to resort to piping the output to yet more cryptic bash commands...

but what if you didn't. Even in Microsoft, you're one "Right Click --> Properties" away from a purple and blue pie graph showing disk usage. Can't we have something similar...or better...in ClearOS!

And so, like most searches for a solution to a new-found problem, I turned to Google with the terms "linux find used disk space web-based", which brought me here as the number one ranked page. Google, you never cease to amaze. According to the summary, Philesight's website says:

"[Philesight]...is designed to run on a remote server without graphical user interface"

Sounded promising. The next 3-4 hours were spent going about what is now a fairly simple process of creating a module for ClearOS.  Simple only because I've done it a few times and can always interrupt Pete across the room with one of my typical rookie questions.  While I was coding a solution to my own problem (and something that will hopefully benefit others in a similar situation), I started thinking about the age-old phrase "give a man a fish, feed him for a day...teach a man to fish, feed him for his entire life". Why not take this opportunity to open a few doors to future ClearOS contributors/hackers? How many developers might we be able to attract if, with a few blogs or howto's, we lowered the barrier to entry to contribute to the ClearOS code base.

Thus, consider this "Part 1" of a blog series I'm entitling Princess and the ClearOS Module, where together, we'll create some dialog around the creation of a module that will dynamically provide information integrated into Webconfig on the disk usage of a ClearOS server.

Certain to one day be, a Disney[TM] classic!

Ben