Wild-eyed thinking aloud: Python System Management Infrastruc ture

[GADGIL PRASAD /INFRA/INFOTECH]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: William Annis [mailto:annis at biostat.wisc.edu]
> Sent: Friday, August 03, 2001 11:56 PM
> To: python-list at python.org
> Subject: Wild-eyed thinking aloud: Python System Management
> Infrastructure
> 
> 
> 
>         I've been a Unix system adminstrator for about 7 years now,
> longer if you count my student admin jobs.  With a few, brief
> exceptions, I have always worked places with small computing budgets.
> We can't afford sexy system management packages which can sometimes
> cost in the US$100,000s.  I mean things like Tivoli, CA Unicenter,
> Bull's OpenMaster, etc.
> 

I think, during CA Unicenter 2.2 ver, CA released the "framework" FREE.
You can search arround and may find someone with the 2 cd set. The 
framework is quite good. With 2.4, it's still there.

>         About once a year I run into some situation where I *want*
> something like one of these tools.  Like many academic sites, we
> started small with a handful of Unix machines and a few dozon users.
> Now we have 100s of users and about 70 Unix machines all doing
> different jobs.  Now I regularly have to rewrite or at least try to
> fix the tools that worked with 15 machines but now fall down: a mass
> of shell scripts, C and perl glommed together with duct tape, caffeine
> and cheap, grad-student labor.
> 
>         It may all just make me crazy.  Our old user management system
> (perl and some C) had a unique and beautiful problem.  It generated
> /etc/passwd and /etc/group from a single data file.  An extra space at
> the end of a line could cause some confusion in the parsing, and what
> you sometimes got was a recreated /etc/passwd with the names and UIDs
> slightly out of alignment.  It was a wonder to behold, a nightmare to
> fix.  That system is gone now.
> 
>         As the years go by I keep reimplementing these things (if
> we're lucky, we buy something) and I can't help but wonder if there
> isn't some Better Way.  I keep writing these tools, but they can't
> chat with each other.
> 
>         Recently I have found myself designing a database-driven
> system to keep track of our machines, what they do, where they sit,
> etc., and I keep thinking "William, you should write an
> *infrastructure* for all this system junk you do."  I've been working
> on a system monitoring tool for several years now, so I have some
> experience in writing distributed systems that, so I already have some
> ideas.  My thoughts right now lean toward a central communications
> daemon/dispatcher attached to a database with various other daemons
> devoted to specfic tasks:
> 
>     * keep track of machine data (my current worry)
>     * user data (including fiscal data if necessary)
>     * system monitoring, event and problem notification
>     * for the adventurous, things like printer and job control, etc...
>       (this should be a infrastructure, and it should be easy
>       to plug in whatever you can think up)
> 
> Of course there are free various tools that do these sorts of things
> out there, but they don't exactly play well together, if at all.  I
> have ideas on how communication should work, and though I have avoided
> the XML kool-aid up to now, I'm willing to concede XML-RPC might be
> useful here.
> 
>         I'd rather not do this alone. So, if there are other Unix
> admins, or NT admins, for that matter, who want to see their favorite
> language used to develop something like this and are willing to do
> some actual work, please contact me.  If there's no interest, I'll
> just crawl back into my office and hush up. :)
> 

If decide to write, check RMON and especially "WBEM". And I guess there must
be some existing effort that does something similar using above standards.

Incedently, I thaught I want to have some test project to learn python , 
and was thinking of something like NOCOL, a OO Framework, rewritten in
python
so that I just have to convert system oriented C code to OO python code :).

> -- 
> William Annis - System Administrator - Biomedical Computing Group
> annis at biostat.wisc.edu                       PGP ID:1024/FBF64031
> Mi parolas Esperanton - La Internacian Lingvon  www.esperanto.org
> -- 
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
> 

/prasad


. 

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