On Friday 25 January 2008 02:18:37 Shea, Graeme A wrote:
First, thankyou Henrik for such a great product.
A Windows port of Hobbit Server would be fantastic for us. We are almost purely a Windows shop and it's just not going to change. I settled on BB purely because it was the only one I found that had a Windows port, did what we wanted (at the time) and we could run it free under the BTF licence. I discovered Hobbit purely by accident fairly recently. It gave enough advantages (mainly ongoing support and development) that the "main" server is now a Hobbit/Ubuntu/VMWare Virtual Server running on one of the Windows boxes. This is our only Linux install. I chose Ubuntu because of it reputation for ease of use for us non Linux people. The clients are still BB though I have started to modify our custom scripts to enable us to use BBWin. I will be using BB for a long time because I have 7 sites non of them could really be called a main site. Each site has it own BB server and is stand alone forwarding the information to the Hobbit server. Since Hobbit cant forward and display at the same time I cant use it. The capability to run another virtual machine is also questionable at some sites.
The next best thing to a windows port would be a MS and/or VMWare virtual server image with everything needed, loaded and going including a GUI and a easy to use GUI text editor.
We run a mostly Unix shop. However, an other group in our company approached us because they needed to monitor about 100 network devices, and didn't have a budget for any software. However, they had bought a PC for management purposes.
I installed Mandriva 2008.0, the included Hobbit and devmon packages, and a backported cacti (for the weathermap plugin which is not in the 2008.0 package), and (even though they didn't use it) a TACACS+ server (tac_plus) and rancid (also shipped in Mandriva 2008.0 contrib).
I added shortcuts on the desktop (e.g. one to run 'sudo kate /etc/hobbit/bb-hosts'), and they had a comprehensive monitoring and management station in 45 minutes work start-to-finish.
I know this is almost heresy for those whose professional lives have been heavily devoted to open source and Linux but it is the reality for us and I'm sure we are not alone.
Maybe there is more benefit to you finding what *other* tools will run on a Unix machine in your environment ...
Regards, Buchan