Re: [hobbit] Future of Hobbit

[Rich Smrcina <rsmrcina (at) wi.rr.com>]

I suggested to Henrik that he get on the SLES distribution and spoke to 
some folks that I knew at SuSE (now Novell) on how to do that and sent 
it to him.

Charles Jones wrote:
> 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.
>
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--
Rich Smrcina
VM Assist, Inc.
Phone: 414-491-6001
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rich.smrcina at vmassist.com
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