printer monitoring v. static bb-hosts

[Chapman Flack <hobbit (at) anastigmatix.net>]

Hi,

I started writing a server extension for CUPS monitoring
(not just testing that the CUPS /server/ is there, but
really monitoring the queue states). The script can easily
learn all of the existing queues and their states from the
CUPS server, and report status with $BB for each queue
using the queue name as hostname and a few different columns
(running, accepting, jobcount).

So, it feels kind of redundant to have to go and add all of
the queue names to bb-hosts (or have them all treated as ghosts
with no way to specify what page they appear on).

How difficult would it be to support a kind of place-holder entry
in bb-hosts, maybe as simple as a group-only tag with a title and
no explicit hosts beneath it:

 group-only running|accepting|jobcount Printers

and then some modified form of the 'status' command in bb:

 $BB $BBDISP "gstatus Printers laser1.running green $(date)"

I bet such a capability would be useful for monitoring a lot
of things besides printers.

Does it seem feasible?

Chapman Flack