[hobbit] Configuration database backend.

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Fri, Dec 08, 2006 at 11:42:31AM +0100, Stef Coene wrote:
> On Friday 08 December 2006 10:12, Johann Eggers wrote:
> > Using a database just for configurations makes things more complex.
> > It would be marvellous if somebody is willing to develop a web-based
> > frontend for editing the config files.
>
> Give me some months ;)
> 
> Hendrik, can you confirm that the config files are compliant with the 
> ini-style of config files ?
> If so, parsing with perl is easy.  If not, maybe we can make them compliant.

Uhm, no - I don't think they are.

hobbit-alerts.cfg is of the form

SELECTIONCRITERIA
	ACTION1 EXTRACRITERIA
	ACTION2
E.g.

GROUP=admins
        MAIL henrik at hswn.dk
SERVICE=timetest
	MAIL henrik-daytime at hswn.dk TIME=*:1546:1700

Internally, Hobbit converts this into a "flat" form, which you'll see if
you use the "dump config" command. The above is equivalent to

	MAIL henrik at hswn.dk GROUP=admins
	MAIL henrik-daytime at hswn.dk TIME=*:1546:1700 SERVICE=TIMETEST


hobbit-clients.cfg is similar. E.g.

HOST=client2.hswn.dk
	PROC sshd TRACK=ssh-daemons
	PROC msgcache TRACK=msgcache-daemons
HOST=freebsd6.hswn.dk
        PROC dhclient

which is converted into the "flat" form of

	PROC sshd TRACK=ssh-daemons HOST=client2.hswn.dk
	PROC msgcache TRACK=msgcache-daemons HOST=client2.hswn.dk
        PROC dhclient HOST=freebsd6.hswn.dk


The only ini-style config file, I believe, is the client-local.cfg file.


However, that doesn't mean you cannot use ini-style files for your
front-end. As long as you can convert whatever configuration style you
use into a format the Hobbit understands, it will work. The actual
Hobbit config file may end up looking pretty awful, but if it's only
going to be read by machines then it doesn't really matter. (Think of
the difference between the sendmail.cf file that sendmail uses, and the
M4 configuration macros that you actually modify when you tweak your
sendmail configuration. And no - I am NOT saying that the Hobbit config
format is just as awful as sendmail.cf :-))


The bb-hosts file is the way it is - I probably don't have to describe
that to you. One change I have in mind for this - well, it will actually
eliminate the bb-hosts file and replace it with something different - is
to split the host definition and the webpage layouts. So there would be
one file defining the hosts (their names, IP-address, what network tests
we run, which graphs to show etc.), and another set of files defining
the layout of the webpages. This will make it much easier to define
multiple layouts for the webpages. Since the format for these new files
hasn't been decided yet, you have almost free hands to choose what it
should be like. All that I ask is that it will be possible to implement
a function to load all of the host definitions like the one currently in
Hobbit's lib/loadhosts_file.c source: This basically reads the entire
bb-hosts file, and splits each of the lines into tokens which can then
be scanned using the known keywords we have for bb-hosts entries.

And please remember to allow for custom keywords, for those who write 
their own custom tests.



Regards,
Henrik