[hobbit] Feature/enhancement request?

[Henrik Stoerner]

Hi David,

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 01:12:53PM +0000, David Gore wrote:
> Since I an others have to modify ~/client/bin/hobbitclient-`uname 
> -s`.sh, how about this shell script using a configuration file?  
> Something like this:
> 
> echo "[date]"
> $DATE
> .
> .
> .
> echo "[ps]"
> $PS
> 
> Config file example 1:
> 
> DATE=/usr/bin/date
> PS=/usr/ucb/ps wwwaux   # needed for monitoring long java command lines
> 
> Config file example 2:
> 
> DATE=/usr/bin/date
> PS=sudo /usr/ucb/ps wwwaux   # SUN changed what Berkeley ps can see, need sudo

I'm not too enthusiastic about this. The output from those commands
eventually end up being parsed over on the Hobbit server, and although
it tries to cope with all of the different output formats that various
Unix variants use, making it simple to change the command also makes it 
easy to break the back-end.

And later on Hobbit might learn to pick up more data from the "ps"
output; like how much memory each process is using and trigger alerts
based on that. This will probably require an even more standardized ps 
output.

Especially the parsing of the "ps" and "disk" output is somewhat brittle.
This data is in my experience something that can vary a lot with different 
commandline options.  Unfortunately, these commands are also the ones that 
people are most keen to modify :-(

It's not absolutely set in stone yet. I'm just trying to explain why
I am somewhat reluctant to let you play with these commands. I would
rather use input from this list to decide on an optimal - but standard -
command and then make sure the backend can handle that.


> We also wouldn't mind seeing only ~/client/bin/hobbitclient-`uname 
> -s`.sh generated or at least a way to only install/copy the version that 
> matches the OS you built the client on.  Perhaps I have just built too 
> many snapshots and it has become tedious to delete all the extra OS 
> versions before deploying a new client.

Why bother? Those extra scripts take up maybe 20 KB of disk space per
client - nothing I'd care about. It's a cosmetic thing only.


> And why is it that the 'w'rite bit has been removed from files like 
> runclient.sh and hobbitclient-`uname -s`.sh?  This just adds another 
> step before we can modify the files. 

Every single file that is distributed by me as part of the Hobbit sources 
is read-only - it's done automatically by the version control system.
And since you shouldn't be changing those files in the first place,
there doesn't seem to be much point in making them writable ...


Regards,
Henrik