Future of Hobbit

[Charles Jones <jonescr (at) cisco.com>]

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.