[hobbit] Future of Hobbit

[Josh Luthman]

1.  What is wrong with the source?  I understand that packages make things
easier but with the exception of my one stupid PEBKAC Henrik identified in
minutes I have compiled it on several machines very quickly and easily.
Managing sources (to my knowledge) is a pretty time consuming task.  While I
agree having the packages there with the release are definitely a plus,
getting the source to package will cost someones time in packaging and
support.

2.  I have one host on the BB client that is going to be migrated here soon
so I don't care either which way ;)

3.  No shit!  I agree completely!  It's like FTP and telnet and stuff...

4.  I'm a black and white text guy myself.  I like  the current page -
informative and a great layout.

The biggest thing here is that this extra work costs extra time (and
money?).  Who is willing to invest their time to do these tasks?

On 1/23/08, Charles Jones <jonescr at cisco.com> wrote:
>
> A funny thing happened this week. I was talking with a coworker about
> the "future of Hobbit", in other words, things that would help Hobbit
> gain more acceptance and grow the community. One of the things that I
> brought up was the need to get Hobbit included into popular Linux
> distributions. I am not sure of the policies or procedures for
> submitting and maintaining a new package into "Linux Distro X".
>
> I decided that I would make a post to the mailing list of some items
> that I thought would be good to grow Hobbit awareness and usage. Here's
> the funny part (to me anyway). I purposefully held off on posting,
> planning to do some research first, because I have discovered I have a
> "habit" of posting a question or comment to the mailing list, and
> seemingly moments after I hit send, I figure out the answer or find some
> tidbit of information that nullifies my comment :)
>
> That being said, I was stunned today to see someone (Axel Beckert)
> mention that they found Hobbit as a Debian package! I have recently done
> a search and could not find it as part of any distros.  Most of the
> servers that I admin are RedHat (EL, CentOS, Fedora), so I'm not as
> active in the Debian community. I will be grabbing those packages to
> examine them as I'm itching to see what the "apt and lib plugins" are :)
>
> All that being said, I'm probably getting close to the "too long didn't
> read" limit on this post, so here is a list, totally off the top of my
> head, that I think could help Hobbit in the future.  I don't know
> whether to call them suggestions or feature requests, I'm just thinking
> out loud. Feel free to quash my ideas, or add your own.
>
> 1. Getting Hobbit added to major linux distributions (apparently someone
> has already made it happen for Debian:
> http://packages.debian.org/hobbit).  Whoever did this, please let us
> know so we can thank you!  Lets get it added to Fedora, Centos Plus,
> SunFreeware, etc.
>
> 2. Moving away from "legacy" filenames and variables.  While in many
> ways compatible with BigBrother, Hobbit is a totally standalone,
> different, and superior product. We should phase out the bb-* config
> files and have them become hobbit-* files, perhaps retaining symlinks so
> that any existing user-made scripts that might have the names hard-coded
> will still work). Everytime I am "teaching" someone how to use Hobbit,
> they ask "why is it called bb-hosts and not hobbit-hosts?", which then
> leads to a quick history lesson on how Hobbit was born :) Note that I
> realize you can override this with the BBHOSTS variable in
> hobbitserver.cfg, but the default name is still confusing for newbies.
>
> 3. Encryption of Hobbit data transmissions. I get this seemingly every
> time that I am explaining Hobbit..."is the data encrypted?" When I say
> no its *gasp!* "But it is sending sensitive information, process lists,
> logfile entries...over the network!". Of course there are user-end ways
> of handling this including using ssh to tunnel the port 1984 traffic,
> but this is hard to manage and doesn't scale well. I would suggest a
> "simple" (heh its always simple to the person who doesn't have to code
> it eh?) implementation of libssl to encrypt the port 1984 traffic. That
> would make a lot of folks (Infosec, Managment, Sysadmins) happy
>
> 4. Maybe a new website? The main hobbit website
> (http://www.hobbitmon.com) honestly looks fine to me, but others tell me
> that it looks more like a demo site (which it also happens to be), and
> the location of the information on what Hobbit is and does is not that
> apparent. I know Henrik has said in the past that he is not a web or UI
> designer, so perhaps we can find volunteers to spruce things up.
>
> I'd write more but I'm already way past the long-post limit, so I will
> wait and see if anyone is interested in discussing this topic.
>
> To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
>
>
>


-- 
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
--- Henry Spencer
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