Ideas for landscape-sysinfo tool

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

Hi Daniel,

> is that information going to be dynamically generated each time an
> user does login, or it's going to be updated in a file every X
> minutes, and the motd message will just happen to be the latest
> version available?    Personally I have some servers I never login

It'll be displayed only during logins, even though it's quite possible
that some of the notes do consider historic information at some
point.

> into, unless I know there is a problem with it, or I know security
> updates are available, which make that message a bit pointless to
> display at login time only.
>
> If that "motd" info was available in a file, then I could find a way
> to push that into a centralized server where I could see it no matter
> when I do an actual login.

This is just one more feature we're implementing in Landscape, and
in this case it'll benefit even administrators that are not Landscape
users.  If you want to reuse it in different situations, the software is
GPL and it should be trivial to just run it from cron and ask it to mail
the information anywhere you want, for instance.

> And actually that type of expanded motd message may be more useful on
> my desktop computer where I login more often than on a server that
> just happily runs in a corner of the server room serving services or
> disk space without human intervention for days at end.

It'll be easy to run it on desktops too.

> These days I'm playing with the getting old Big Brother (www.bb4.org)
> to centralize messages from various servers into one web page.  Now
> looking at some of the info I have been tracking that way from my
> servers:  connectivity, system load, disk usage (i.e, specific
> important disks are nearly full while other disks I can ignore), if
> specific processes are still running (by default big brother tracks
> cron), and if specific services are online and listening (ftp, http,
> ssh). I could see some of these bits of info being useful in that motd
> message.
>
> It is on my to-do list to tied into Dell's OMSA and track down as well
> more hardware specific basic info (temperature, state of disks and
> raid, are the fans working, etc).

Nice ideas!  Thank you!

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net