On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 11:42:31AM +0100, Stef Coene wrote:
On Friday 08 December 2006 10:12, Johann Eggers wrote:
Using a database just for configurations makes things more complex. It would be marvellous if somebody is willing to develop a web-based frontend for editing the config files.
Give me some months ;)
Hendrik, can you confirm that the config files are compliant with the ini-style of config files ? If so, parsing with perl is easy. If not, maybe we can make them compliant.
Uhm, no - I don't think they are.
hobbit-alerts.cfg is of the form
SELECTIONCRITERIA ACTION1 EXTRACRITERIA ACTION2 E.g.
GROUP=admins MAIL henrik at hswn.dk SERVICE=timetest MAIL henrik-daytime at hswn.dk TIME=*:1546:1700
Internally, Hobbit converts this into a "flat" form, which you'll see if you use the "dump config" command. The above is equivalent to
MAIL henrik at hswn.dk GROUP=admins
MAIL henrik-daytime at hswn.dk TIME=*:1546:1700 SERVICE=TIMETESThobbit-clients.cfg is similar. E.g.
HOST=client2.hswn.dk PROC sshd TRACK=ssh-daemons PROC msgcache TRACK=msgcache-daemons HOST=freebsd6.hswn.dk PROC dhclient
which is converted into the "flat" form of
PROC sshd TRACK=ssh-daemons HOST=client2.hswn.dk
PROC msgcache TRACK=msgcache-daemons HOST=client2.hswn.dk
PROC dhclient HOST=freebsd6.hswn.dkThe only ini-style config file, I believe, is the client-local.cfg file.
However, that doesn't mean you cannot use ini-style files for your front-end. As long as you can convert whatever configuration style you use into a format the Hobbit understands, it will work. The actual Hobbit config file may end up looking pretty awful, but if it's only going to be read by machines then it doesn't really matter. (Think of the difference between the sendmail.cf file that sendmail uses, and the M4 configuration macros that you actually modify when you tweak your sendmail configuration. And no - I am NOT saying that the Hobbit config format is just as awful as sendmail.cf :-))
The bb-hosts file is the way it is - I probably don't have to describe that to you. One change I have in mind for this - well, it will actually eliminate the bb-hosts file and replace it with something different - is to split the host definition and the webpage layouts. So there would be one file defining the hosts (their names, IP-address, what network tests we run, which graphs to show etc.), and another set of files defining the layout of the webpages. This will make it much easier to define multiple layouts for the webpages. Since the format for these new files hasn't been decided yet, you have almost free hands to choose what it should be like. All that I ask is that it will be possible to implement a function to load all of the host definitions like the one currently in Hobbit's lib/loadhosts_file.c source: This basically reads the entire bb-hosts file, and splits each of the lines into tokens which can then be scanned using the known keywords we have for bb-hosts entries.
And please remember to allow for custom keywords, for those who write their own custom tests.
Regards, Henrik