[Netdisco] Splitting netdisco's roles across hosts

[Jethro R B. <jet...@st...>]

On Mon, 10 Jan 2011, Ingen Schenau, Jeroen van (ICTS) wrote:                    
                                                                                
> > By the way the background for this is that our netdisco users can't         
> > access the network that is allowed to 'snmp' the network, hence the         
> > separate servers.                                                           
>                                                                               
> I guess you could run the frontend and backend on different machines; as      
> long as the frontend can access the same DB that the backend is using         
> (and the users can access the frontend via HTTP(s)), that could work          
> too.                                                                          
                                                                                
As an aside to this thread, I think Oliver once said that he ran Netdisco 
split across a number of servers: I suppose a DB backend, a WWW front-end, 
and maybe the cron job submission stuff somewhere else.
                                                                                
Anyway, the point I wanted to make (it has been brewing for many years)         
was that some people may definitely like to at least have the WWW               
front-end running separate server from the rest of the stuff, and it would      
be useful (especially for packagers) if the components for front-end and        
back-end could be offered separately.                                           
                                                                                
There is some commonality between f/e and b/e with at least netdisco.pm         
and netdisco.conf, which might imply you need three distributions/package:      
netdisco-core, netdisco-frontend, netdisco-backend.  At this point it           
starts to get more complicated, and I wonder if it then becomes more            
trouble than it is worth, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.                  
                                                                                
... Thinking about it some more, the db part is easily separated from the 
rest; you essentially just need netdisco/sql, and perhaps more guidance in 
the install notes on what to do if you are running the db remotely (ensure 
postgres is listening to tcp connections and so on).  Maybe that is a 
better and more natural split: netdisco-db contains just the db stuff for 
configuring and extending postgres, and netdisco-frontend has all the 
perly/html stuff.  If you want the WWW stuff on a separate host to the 
cron scripts, you have to work harder, and keep consistency for things 
like netdisco.pm.

Maybe if netdisco.conf could be split into two config files, one for the 
WWW-related stuff and one for more backend-y stuff, that would help.  
Perhaps other changes could be made to more easily facilitate running 
these different roles separately, without too much duplication of 
config/files.

Jethro.

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Jethro R Binks, Network Manager,
Information Services Directorate, University Of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK

The University of Strathclyde is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, number SC015263.