BB vs Hobbit: How to get rid of displaying the ps output?

[Axel Beckert]

Hi,

Found hobbit recently via its new Debian package[1].

  [1] http://packages.debian.org/hobbit

At work we're monitoring nearly 500 machines with BB. The BB server is
due to being replaced with a fresh setup on new hardware, not only
because of performance problems.

So the Debian hobbit package just came right and we would like to
switch from BB to hobbit because of performance _and_ features. :-)

Several of us are currently playing around with hobbit on our private
servers.  We especially love the apt and libs plugins. :-)

Now, after a week or two of using and exploring hobbit we noticed a
few things we liked better with BB. We were able to fix most of them
ourselves via templates and config files.

But there is one thing we wonder if it is configurable or a hardcoded
features in hobbit. We looked through the docs (web pages as well as
man pages), but didn't find a hint on this questions yet, so I
thought, I'll try the list. (The list archive didn't bring up anything
helpful yet. :-)

So here's the question:

Is there a possibility to _not_ show the whole ps output in the procs
details CGI? BB only showed the monitored processes. With hobbit this
page shows the whole ps output. IMHO this is a privacy issue -- even
with a passowrd protection for the CGI scripts -- since the output may
get saved permanently in the history. (I do not want to think about
what happens if the locally configured password protection is found to
not working correctly in a complex enterprise setup...)

In my personal case, the hobbit server runs on a server I share with
friends. Although I do trust them regarding the server, there's no
need for them being able to monitor e.g. which MP3s I'm listening to
at home or which games I play on the laptop. On dialup machines I just
can switch off the hobbit client while gaming or listening MP3s, but
that's no real solution.

On the job it's approximately the same problem, just in a bigger
scale. We monitor a few hundred managed workstations with BB, but we
don't want to keep the old BB client just because of this privacy
issue, especially since the hobbit client would gives us a lot of
advantages.

Thanks in advance for any hints on these issues.

P.S.: We're running the 4.2.0 version of hobbit as packaged by Debian
respectively Backports.org.

		Kind regards, Axel Beckert
-- 
Axel Beckert <beckert at phys.ethz.ch>       support: +41 44 633 2668
IT Support Group, HPR E 86.1              voice:   +41 44 633 4189
Departement Physik, ETH Zurich            fax:     +41 44 633 1239
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