[sisuite-users] Call for Ideas and Help for systemimager development and enhancements.

[LAHAYE O. <oli...@ce...>]

Dear users and developers,

SystemImager is in heavy development right now, but as I’m alone on this development, progress is slower than I wish.

Some features are hard to maintain in term of OS compatibility and one of them is the remote console (using si_monitortk and clicking on a host being deployed)
This console depends on an ANSI Color Tk text widget I need to package and that may not be maintained in the future.
I also have a problem with refresh that hangs depending on netcat/nc/ncat versions that use different console switches.

For now, the remote console has the following problems:

  *   Can’t see the console log of a NATed client being imaged
  *   Can’t see the console log if the client imaging is finished
  *   Can’t see multiple consoles at a time
  *   Can’t filter logs (select only errors or only warnings for example)
  *   Logs stays on client and needs to be transferred by hand if one want to share it
  *   Based on perl/Tk with depedancy to TkTermANSIColor that is not packaged in distros
  *   Has problems with some ncat versions (nc, ncat multiple versions, netcat) (sockets timeout, hangs if input timeout (filesystem init too long, …)
  *   Requires an X display to start si_monitortk
  *   Requires to connect to image server to start si_monitortk

IMHO, a really cool feature would be to add a web interface to image server with the following features:

  *   Hosts statuses (si_monitortk main window replacement)
  *   Console log (with page auto-refresh for update)
  *   Info page with general setup
  *   HTML Online Doc
  *   PXE config
  *   More?

I think XSL and PHP would be the most timeline stable languages to create the web interface (other are constantly upgrading and obsoleting features and need port every 2 years or so with tons of libraries with v0.0.1 versions that die and become incompatible quickly)
/var/lib/systemimager/clients.xml which contains the client informations is in xml format, thus xsl is well suited to transform it to HTML…

Regarding the log storage daemon, I don’t know what would be the best, but as systemimagers is mainly based on perl and bash, I support perl would be the language of choice as bash would depend on nc/ncat/netcat that I want to avoid at any cost as behavior is inconsistent across distros and versions.

What do you think? Ideas and/or help is welcome 😊

Cheers,

Olivier.

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   Olivier LAHAYE
   SystemImager v5 active developer.