First contact with faimond / faimond-gui

[Thomas Neumann]

hiya

Just some quick thoughts on faimond & faimond-gui.

1)
The variable "monserver" could use some explanation. Currently I set this
variable via the pxeboot command line. This works, but is a bit clumsy.
Maybe there is a better solution, but at the moment I just need "a"
solution. I could ignore setting this variable, because the fai-server is
the monitoring server - but I'd like to be able to separate them.

2)
"faimond -b" is a bit too restrictive. Using fai-chboot I am able to
specify a custom directory, but faimond calls fai-chboot without "-D". (My
tftp config directory is "/srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg") I worked around this by
creating a symlink /srv/tftp/fai/pxelinux.cfg -> /srv/tftp/pxelinux.cfg.
(Reason: My tftp server contains more then fai.)

3)
However I'm not convinced that faimond should have the "-b" functionality
at all. Using "-b" (which is a nice feature) implies that faimond is
located on the same server as the tftp-server _and_ fai-server.
Furthermore if you intend to use faimond-gui, then this also implies this
server being a X client.

Maybe it's just me, but to me this smells of bad design because a lot of
functionality must be concentrated in one place.

Possible change:
  - split faimond+faimond-gui into a separate package
  - let fai-server recommend faimond-package
  - introduce a new option which calls a hook

Benefit:

1) monitoring fai can be separated into a totally disjunctive server

  installing faimond does not require you to install: nfs, dhcp & tftp

2) faimond can be made more flexible

  hook may call fai-chboot with custom options
  hook may contain a ssh-script which executes fai-chboot on different server
  hook may send a mail "install has finished"
  hook may update a flag in a database

4)
faimond-gui doesn't work (for me). I wrote a small init-script which runs
faimond as a background process. When installing a server some progress
information gets written to /var/log/faimond.log. But when I execute
  faimond-gui /var/log/faimond.log
then nothing happens at all. Too make sure it is not related to the
fai-server I installed the fai-server package onto my desktop box and
copied the logfile. perl-tk is installed, X is running properly.
faimond-gui does nothing (visible).

The manpage is telling me to run "faimond | faimond-gui -", but I don't
want to start faimond manually. The logfile and "-b" are more important to
me then a pretty window.

process list:
/usr/bin/perl -w /usr/sbin/faimond -d -T -b

log file:
Tue Mar 30 17:05:38 2010 - FAI monitoring daemon starting..
Tue Mar 30 17:05:38 2010 - FAI monitoring daemon started on port 4711 with
pid 27581
Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda check
Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN confdir
Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKEND confdir 0
Tue Mar 30 17:12:08 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN setup
Tue Mar 30 17:12:09 2010 - belinda TASKEND setup 0
[...]
Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda HOOK savelog.LAST.source
Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda TASKBEGIN savelog
Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - belinda TASKEND savelog 0
Tue Mar 30 17:13:27 2010 - 10.255.128.134:58607: Disabling pxelinux
configuration for belinda


# faimond-gui /var/log/faimond.log
^C
# cat /var/log/faimond.log |faimond-gui -
^C