[hobbit] New features

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2005 at 07:25:40PM -0400, kevin hanrahan wrote:

>  Since you are adding new features, I would like to request
> one. Would it be possible to add a web interface for adding and
> deleting clients?

It's possible, yes - but not terribly high on my priority list.

There are really two parts of this. 

First, we need some kind of "property editor" for the hosts that are
defined in Hobbit - a tool where you can tweak all of the
host-specific settings, like what network tests to perform, whether it
should be tested using IP-address or host name, what IP address it's
got etc. This ought to be really simple - it's essentially building a
web front-end to a simple database - except that the database holding
the records is a flat text-file, not a real DB. So we should convert
Hobbit into using a database instead of a plain text file for this
data, and this is something I have on my to-do list - all of the tools
using the bb-hosts file have been converted into using an API for
fetching the data in the bb-hosts file, so it's just a matter of
coming up with a MySQL back-end for it.

The second part requires a bit more web GUI creativity - it's about
how you can create a web front-end to define the page layouts for
Hobbit (the "page", "subpage", "group-compress", "title" etc. tags you
currently have in bb-hosts, but which do not relate to any specific
host). Since I'm really a nuts-n-bolts engineering kind of guy, I have
no idea how best to tackle this. If there's some brilliant
web-designer out there who would care to lend a hand with this, it
would be very helpful.

Of course, for completeness we'd need a web-interface to the alert
configuration. I haven't given that much thought yet.


Regards,
Henrik