[hobbit] NKedit and Instructions

[ZanDAhaR]

Epp, Matthew Contractor PEO EIS AKO wrote:
> Greetings! We've been using Big Brother in our datacenter here for over 5
> years now, and I've been testing out Hobbit for a few weeks now, planning to
> eventually migrate to it. One of the things I'm trying to accomplish before
> moving fully to Hobbit is to integrate some of the customizations I've made
> to BB.
>
> The one feature I'm focusing on right now is similar to the "Instructions"
> section handled by NKedit. In my custom BB, I edited a section of
> dohostsvc.c to read in files containing plain text or html. This content
> gets placed at the bottom of any page generated from bb-dohostsvc.sh.
>
> Basically, a file called comments.conf resides in $BBHOME/www/comments/ and
> looks like this:
>
> ----[cut]----
> # This is the configuration file for the Special Instructions section on
> # all Big Brother alert pages. To create a new alert message, put whatever
> # text you want into a new file, call it anything you like, but try to
> # stick to the convention of group.service. Wildcards also work, but place
> # them at the bottom of the file, so that absolute matches can override
> # the wildcard entries.
>  
> # NOTE: Make sure there are no trailing spaces at the end of the line.
> #       I'll be adding in error checking code for that asap.
>  
> # Portal Application Servers rules group
> hostname*.int.*.us.army.mil.disk appservers.disk
> Army_Home_Page.http Army_Home_Page.http
> mail*.http mail_servers
>
> #
> # Place all wildcard matches below here
> #
>  
> *.cpu ALL.cpu
> *.disk ALL.disk
> *.msgs ALL.msgs
> *.procs ALL.procs
> *.http ALL.http
> *.conn ALL.conn
> ----[cut]----
>
> Then, in the same directory, you just create the files like appservers.disk,
> or mail_servers, whatever you've called them, and the content loads whenever
> anyone goes to a bb-dohostsvc.sh page that matches. It works really well,
> and the only downside is having to ssh in and manually edit the conf file
> and content files. But you can use any html code you want, and don't have to
> worry about extra spaces, line feeds/carriage returns, etc.
>
> What I need to do now is decide how best to proceed with setting this up in
> Hobbit. I'd like to be able to edit the content from the web interface
> somehow. The "Instruction" field in the existing nkedit is good for short
> comments, but we've been using long descriptive html output with web links
> and such. With some experimentation, I found that you can do the same thing
> in nkedit, but you have to remove any special tags like nbsp; and all
> newline characters or it makes the hobbit-nkview.cfg file unreadable.
>
> I'm going to start looking at the source for bb-hostsvc.sh tomorrow to see
> where I'd need to make changes, but I wanted to throw this out there to see
> if anyone had any thoughts. If anyone else would also like my existing code
> for BB, I can post that. :)
>
> ---
> Matthew Epp
> Sr Unix Engineer
> Army Knowledge Online (PEO/EIS) / CherryRoad Technologies
> Sitesupport Engineering (SEO)
>
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>
>   
Completely off topic but it amazes me how far hobbit reaches and what 
organisations it appeals to. Its so cool to know that someone like the 
US army/military (or some division there of) are actually using  it

Allan