[wplug] mildly OT: RHN & Solaris

[Poyner, Brandon]

> I'd like to see that happen. I haven't yet seen any functionality from
> RHN similar to Novell's ability to migrate, say, web serving between
> machines without downtime. It seems to me that such 
> functionality would be required for automated repurposing.

I couldn't tell you if there is no downtime, but currently you can use
the RHN monitoring module with the provisioning module to repurpose
machines.  Since I use neither I claim ignorance.

> I'm really looking forward to Nagios 3.0, since it's been 
> said that the interface will be abstracted more from the core
> functionality. I'd imagine that separation will bring flexibility
> along with it.
 
Do you mean Nagios 2.0?  That's getting very close to a release
candidate.

> Nagios is really neat as it stands, although I'd like to see more
> powerful host grouping functionality, including nested groupings. I'd
> also like to see the ability to add services to a template which would
> cascade to descendants, or to add services to a hostgroup which would
> apply to members. And collapsible views. Those would be nice 
> too. Yeah.

I'm not really sure I follow you on half of that.  I make extensive use
of templating for hosts, services, and contacts which keeps things sane.
I can see where using a hostgroup in a service check could be nice, but
you could also list them as a group under the service, example:

define service{
        name                            24-7
...
        active_checks_enabled           1
        max_check_attempts              3
        normal_check_interval           3
        retry_check_interval            1
        notification_options            w,u,c,r
        register                        0
}

define service{
        use                             24-7
        name                            linux-template
        contact_groups                  linux-admins
        register                        0
}

define service{
        use                             linux-template
        host_name                       host1,host2,host3,host4
        service_description             NTP
        check_command                   check_ntp
}

Brandon Poyner
Network Engineer III
CCAC - College Office
412-237-3086