[hobbit] Future of Hobbit

[Buchan Milne]

On Friday 25 January 2008 02:18:37 Shea, Graeme A wrote:
> First, thankyou Henrik for such a great product.
>
> A Windows port of Hobbit Server would be fantastic for us. We are almost
> purely a Windows shop and it's just not going to change. I settled on BB
> purely because it was the only one I found that had a Windows port, did
> what we wanted (at the time) and we could run it free under the BTF
> licence. I discovered Hobbit purely by accident fairly recently. It gave
> enough advantages (mainly ongoing support and development) that the
> "main" server is now a Hobbit/Ubuntu/VMWare Virtual Server running on
> one of the Windows boxes. This is our only Linux install. I chose Ubuntu
> because of it reputation for ease of use for us non Linux people. The
> clients are still BB though I have started to modify our custom scripts
> to enable us to use BBWin. I will be using BB for a long time because I
> have 7 sites non of them could really be called a main site. Each site
> has it own BB server and is stand alone forwarding the information to
> the Hobbit server. Since Hobbit cant forward and display at the same
> time I cant use it. The capability to run another virtual machine is
> also questionable at some sites.
>
>
> The next best thing to a windows port would be a MS and/or VMWare
> virtual server image with everything needed, loaded and going including
> a GUI and a easy to use GUI text editor.

We run a mostly Unix shop. However, an other group in our company approached 
us because they needed to monitor about 100 network devices, and didn't have 
a budget for any software. However, they had bought a PC for management 
purposes.

I installed Mandriva 2008.0, the included Hobbit and devmon packages, and a 
backported cacti (for the weathermap plugin which is not in the 2008.0 
package), and (even though they didn't use it) a TACACS+ server (tac_plus) 
and rancid (also shipped in Mandriva 2008.0 contrib).

I added shortcuts on the desktop (e.g. one to run 'sudo 
kate /etc/hobbit/bb-hosts'), and they had a comprehensive monitoring and 
management station in 45 minutes work start-to-finish.

> I know this is almost heresy for those whose professional lives have
> been heavily devoted to open source and Linux but it is the reality for
> us and I'm sure we are not alone.

Maybe there is more benefit to you finding what *other* tools will run on a 
Unix machine in your environment ...

Regards,
Buchan