[Xymon] FOLLOWUP: Script to rotate on-call tech hourly and weekly

[Elizabeth Schwartz]

A long ways back, I posted asking about how to rotate paging when
there was a complex paging schedule, with multiple people working
overlapping shifts.
In addition to our hourly on-duty schedule we have weekly rotations
for various teams on-call. We wanted to be able to tell xymon to page
the DBA on-call or the tech ons duty this hour,
without having to write what were becoming increasingly cumbersome rules.

Well, we couldn't find anything that would do what we wanted,  so we
ended up writing something in-house.
(I say "we" but I mean one of our developers, who gave up some
"innovation Friday" time and some personal evening/weekend time as
well!)

It's still in the quick-and-dirty stage, not  well-documented or
polished enough to release as an open source tool yet, but we'd like
to get it there.

Meanwhile I wanted to share it. You're welcome to look at it and to
use it in whole or in part,
but please do not  formally redistribute it until we can get it into
better shape. We just started production acceptance testing of xymon
and this script, this week.

A link from my personal account:

http://www.well.com/~betsys/get-tech-on-call.pl
http://www.well.com/~betsys/dummy_sched.xml

I would very much welcome any feedback or improvements.

The program takes as input an XML file containing definitions for
people (name, email, and pager) , one or more lines for each tech in
the weekly schedule, and a line for each of the weekly rotations. It
outputs a list of the pager addresses for each person on duty,
suitable for using as a mail alias file, or a list of names, OR a
weekly schedule in csv format for ease of reading in a spreadsheet to
check your work.