[wplug] mildly OT: RHN & Solaris

Chester R. Hosey Chester.Hosey at gianteagle.com
Fri Aug 19 15:33:52 EDT 2005


On Fri, 2005-08-19 at 11:33 -0400, Poyner, Brandon wrote:
> > 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.

Fair enough. SuSE lets you do some *really neat* things, like migrating
services such as MySQL and Apache between SuSE machines (or even back
and forth with Netware machines, in some cases!) with a nice
administrative interface.

Good luck finding pricing information, though.

I think RHN's repurposing is merely bringing a machine to a given
installation state (package set), but I might be mistaken there.

> > 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.

Nope, 3.0. Nifty things are in store, like breaking the CGIs off of the
main distribution for more agile development of both. Custom metadata
will also be assignable to objects, but I'm not sure about inheritance.

Currently I have something like:

host {
	name		unix-template
	use		generic-host
#	services	ssh, ftp
}

host {
	name		some-unix-host1
	use		unix-template
#	services	-ftp
}

host {
	name		some-unix-host2
	use		unix-template
}

...and a script which will parse the configuration files and auto-
generate service entries including relevant hosts. It handles the
inheritance. For instance, for the above config snippet, output would
include service definitions like:

define service {
	use		ssh
	host_name	some-unix-host1, some-unix-host2
}

define service {
	use		ftp
	host_name	some-unix-host2
}

It can also generate serviceextinfo blocks. It's not bulletproof (it
silently ignores services which aren't actually defined somewhere), but
it's a good workaround for not being able to assign services to
hostgroups. I have tons of systems with cookie-cutter configurations,
and it's a pain to have to manually edit each service definition when
adding or removing a single host (or generate lists of hosts when adding
or removing services).

> > 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:

I don't want to have to maintain the information in several places.
Nagios is flexible in its configuration, but not always as powerful as
I'd like.

As far as nested groupings, I'd like to see structure like the
following:

+ world
  + Ohio
  + Montana
  + Pennsylvania
    + Eastern
    + Western
      + Pittsburgh
      + Slovan
        + Building A
          + Floor 1
          + Floor 2
          + Floor 3
          + Floor 4
          + Floor 5
          + Floor 6
        + Building B
  + Zaire

Basically at each view level you'd see summary status of all contained
objects. I could "drill down" as far as necessary, or stick with a
summary view of whatever I see fit.

You can do something similar with host and service groups, but there's
no sense of nesting, which means that this structure isn't apparent at a
glance from the CGI interface.

It looks like GroundWork Monitor does something similar, but then you're
getting into proprietary solutions and out of my territory and I'm still
not sure about whether levels of nesting are permitted. See
http://www.itgroundwork.com/quicktours/monitor-0805/02-06.html for a
screenshot of something vaguely similar.

Chet


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