On Sun, Dec 18, 2005 at 10:28:17AM -0500, Scott Walters wrote:
Ahhh the BB/Hobbit, "How about a DB backend question ;)"
I've always been amazed that BB and Hobbit could use a filesystem as
a database and not kill a server much *sooner*. hobbits use of
memory for bbvar/logs is a huge win . . . .Ideally the backend for most, if not all, of the state/history
information for events would be a database. Problem is, that
introduces a dependency of the product (hobbit) an another tool
(Database). This can very easily become a nightmare from a support/ integration point of view. Not to mention you raise the bar for
entry level admins ability to 'tinker' with the product.Unless the entire hobbit tool were re-architected to have DB back- end, I don't think it would be worth the overall effort for keeping
the histlogs area small.
That in itself would not gain you much, I agree. There has to be some other benefit besides the space-win to justify moving to a DB backend. E.g. if there were some fancy backend pulling data from Hobbit which could benefit from having the Hobbit data in a DB.
That's *not* to say it isn't a good idea or it *wouldn't* be a great
coding project for someone.
The nice thing about it is that this can be implemented as a separate module, without affecting the core Hobbit programs at all. So if someone desperately needs a DB backend for the Hobbit history-data, I'm sure that they will figure out how to write one and offer me the sources for inclusion :-)
But I think it would be a better use of resources and benefit more of
the user community if hobbit could internally, archive and retrieve
this data. The history data is *extremely* useful and having it
around is a wonderful asset for problem history/determination.Henrik, I was thinking along the lines of every month or so archive
the histlogs into a single large file, or one file per host, and then
introduce logic into the show history that could determine if it
needed to expand the archive to get it.
That idea had crossed my mind. The archiving bit is something I already do with a fairly simple shell script once a month; this can easily be turned into a general solution. Adding a bit of code to try and extract the history logfile from an archive if the file is not immediately available is also rather trivial. So maybe I'll try and do it.
Henrik