I have no issue editing hosts and config files manually...if It becomes known there's a GUI interface I'll get all kinds of users wanting access and adding things that don't need to be there and just screwing things up in general.
Sometimes making things easier just makes them more complicated...
Ken Connell Intermediate Network Engineer Computer & Communication Services Ryerson University 350 Victoria St RM AB50 Toronto, Ont M5B 2K3 416-979-5000 x6709
-----Original Message----- From: Henrik Størner <henrik at hswn.dk> Sender: xymon-bounces at xymon.com Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2012 23:04:10 To: Xymon mailinglist<xymon at xymon.com> Subject: [Xymon] Hand editing config files
Hi,
in another mail thread, another monitoring tool (Zenoss) was mentioned which had the advantage of “no hand editing of config files”.
Text based config files have their ups and downs - they are infinitely flexible and can adapt to all sorts of weird ways of defining your setup, but it is also easier to "get it wrong" and put something in there which doesn't work. Even happens to me occasionally.
It's the age-old debate over whether something is "powerful" or "dangerous".
I am currently working on the next Xymon version (except I've been swamped with for-pay work the past couple of months ... and a hefty round of lay-offs in other departments than mine). This involves a complete rewrite of the network testing tool, and for this rewrite I've started using an SQLite database for storing some intermediate data used by the network tester, instead of keeping it in a bunch of temporary text-files.
And it has made me consider the idea of using a database for storing at least some of the configuration - first of all the hosts.cfg configuration of hosts, IP-adresses and network tests. This would make some things simpler, others a bit more complex - "xymongrep", for instance - but would also make it a lot easier to provide a GUI for managing what hosts are being monitored.
This is not going to happen anytime soon, but since the subject was up in the air - what do you think about it ? Is it a major problem that Xymon has all configuration in text files ? How many of you auto-generate the Xymon config by extracting the information from a database already ?
Just looking for some feedback...
Regards, Henrik
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