[hobbit] Future of Hobbit

[Buchan Milne]

On Thu, 2008-01-24 at 07:50 +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 04:09:35PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:
> > 1. Getting Hobbit added to major linux distributions 
> 
> Would be nice. This is one area of Hobbit work where everyone on this
> list can make a contribution. Hobbit includes a "hobbit.spec" file for
> building rpm packages, and the Debian folks already have .deb's, so
> for most distro's it would be very little work to add Hobbit,

1)Ideally, the spec file should be in the top-level directory, so that
'rpm -ta hobbit-4.2.0.tar.gz' works.

2)IMHO, the current spec file sucks ...

3)Hobbit has been in Mandriva for a long time, and the SRPMs build and
run fine on all versions of RHEL I have tried them on (2.1AS, 3, 4, 5).
I cleaned the spec file up a lot for the Mandriva package (so there are
no conflicts between the client and server subpackage etc.):

http://svn.mandriva.com/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/packages/cooker/hobbit/current/SPECS/



> > 2. Moving away from "legacy" filenames and variables.  
> 
> The bb-hosts file is about the only one left. My intention has been to
> keep that name until Hobbit moved away from the file format in bb-hosts;
> something which I've been wanting to do for a while. The bb-hosts format
> is getting rather overloaded, and I really don't like the way it mixes
> the host configuration with the web page layout definitions. So this is
> going to change sometime.

Please consider an extensible format, by which I mean, a means for
external checks (dbcheck, devmon, extension scripts) to retrieve their
configuration from a standard set of directives.

> 
> > 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!". 

And SNMPv2?

> Yeah ... well, I should add some SSL support to the protocol.

A START_TLS command would be great ...


Regards,
Buchan