hobbitfetch - for Hobbit clients that cannot reach the Hobbit server

[Henrik Stoerner]

Some of you may be wondering what's happened since there is no release
(candidate) of 4.2 yet.

Part of the explanation is that I've been working on an urgent request
from one of the Hobbit'ers, to come up with a solution where the Hobbit
clients are not allowed to send data from the client (in a DMZ) to the
Hobbit server (on the internal network).

It's ready for some initial testing now, and I will include it in the
4.2 release but with a warning that it's very fresh and hasn't been
tested much. But there have been several requests for this over time, 
so if this is something you may want to use, grab the latest snapshot
and try it out.

The way it works is that the client installation now includes a new
tool called "msgcache". This is a "message cache"; the Hobbit client
sends its data to msgcache (by having BBDISP set to 127.0.0.1 in the
client configuration), and any add-on extensions also report their
status to msgcache.

On the Hobbit server, a new task "hobbitfetch" then polls all of the
clients running msgcache, collects the messages they have saved, and
sends them off to the Hobbit server.

More information about setting it up is in the "msgcache" and
"hobbitfetch" man-pages. You basically enable the tasks in the
server- and client-configuration, and add a "pulldata" option to
the client entries in the bb-hosts file.

One advantage of this is that no modifications are needed on the client;
all of your custom extension script will just work. And since
hobbitfetch has been written to poll lots of clients simultaneously,
it also scales better than e.g. copying the data from clients using
scp or an SSH tunnel.

Also, it is compatible with the Hobbit way of configuring clients 
centrally on the Hobbit server.


Regards,
Henrik