Overview
Purpose Why use muon cockpit and by whom
Features Main program features
Requirements Hardware and software requirements to use muon cockpit
Version History Version bugfixes and enhancements
 

Purpose
Muon Cockpit is a program to analyze and monitor one or more Muon DPAD clients.
It is the logical successor of the Muon result viewer but offers much more functions like MRV.

You can think about Muon Cockpit as a controlling center for all of your muon clients, regardless if you let run three, thirty or even still much more.
Clients can run local or anywhere in the network. You have no need to map any extra network drive to see clients, but point to a client's folder easily via UNC path.

Any participant of Stephen Brooks Muon DC project may find muon cockpit useful, because it gives a detailled view into the client work results and let manage client configuration quite easily.

For owners of muon client farms it may be also helpful, because it checks client's activity state and monitors dead clients by a red stop icon in the overview list.

Hunters of best muon-% values will find the highest percent score of each client results in the overview list and can control the growing of best results by looking into the queue if a client runs quarantined results.
↑ top


Features
The most important informations of all clients are shown in an overview list (Client identification, results related informations, current optimization and performance values).
For any selected client you can choose among four detail views: current or history results, queued results, client configuration and performance status.

In the case of results details, it is also possible to view *.dat files of muon instances.
It doesn't matter what kind of client version is run, because muon cockpit supports all formats up to the version 4.41b.

Another nice feature is free multiselection of list items.
This multiselection feature is available in clients overview list and in detail results list. Using multiselection, makes it possible to build groups of list items by sorting and select such a group.
A summary based only on the selected items is shown in the second row, either in detail results view or in overview summary.

Export allows you to write all selected list items into a semicolon separated text file. When creating the export file, muon cockpit respects the current list sorting.
The last used export folder will be preset on a new export, so you can collect your export files easily in a central folder.

Muon cockpit is not shown in the task bar, but resides in the system tray.
If you minimize it, you can access main functions using the popup menu of the tray icon.
Double click the tray icon brings it in the foreground (if it's open but behind other windows) or restores it back if it was minimized.
↑ top


Requirements
Hardware requirements
CPU: Nothing special, parsing result files is related to CPU speed, the faster, the better :)
HDD: Nothing special, uses less than 2MB HDD space after installation
RAM: Recommended lower limit: 256MB (all result details are hold in memory)

Software requirements
The program should run on every 32-bit Windows version like Win9x, ME, NT, 2K, XP and 2003 Server.
It is written in VB6 using some 3rd party components, which will force a restart on the most systems after the first installation. Full Setup contains all needed components like VB runtime and other dlls.
↑ top


Version History
Version Release date Description
1.00, Build 1 July 17, 2004 Initial Release
This was the first version introduced to the public.
1.01, Build 2 July 29, 2004 Bugfix
  1. Added "auto.sav" (created by muon1_background.exe) to possible *.sav files for client activity check
    This caused wrong client activity information on machines running the client in background or as a service.
    (Contributed by kitsura)

  2. Added XP-style icons to details ActionBar
    Before this, icons were invisible in XP under 32bit color depth.

  3. Improved validation of missing clients
    When a client was disconnected from network, muon cockpit under some conditions could run into an exception. This should be solved now.
1.02, Build 3 Oct. 19, 2004 Changes
  1. Support for changed "Threads" option
    Muon cockpit now supports the changed "Threads" option in config.txt, introduced with client version 4.41f.
    Now Threads may be a number or set to "auto", which is the default value

  2. Improved optimal inactivity rate setting in the case of no autosave
    If no autosave is set (Auto-save interval = 0 in config.txt), setting the optimal inactivity rate in client editor will use 45 minutes.
    In this case only result.dat (or queue.txt) can be used to get informations about client activity. So muon cockpit will have to wait longer than a complete result is finished.
    45 minutes are only an assumption which can be manually adjusted depending on the related machine speed.
↑ top