Michael DeHaan wrote:
Hi folks,
It's time to showcase another neat app written using func. It's
"func-inventory". Func-inventory is just 153 lines of Python, and I
wrote the initial version
in about half of a day. I'm not saying that to brag, I'm saying
that because this means func is *REALLY* simple to build new
applications on.
What does Func-inventory do? It's an app that allows for
inventorying (and inventory tracking) of anything. Anything that has
a func module can be stored, and the inventory
is kept over time in version control, to see what items have been
added or changed.
We're going to ship func-inventory in the func RPM, so it will be part
of the standard toolset.
How about an example?
# func-inventory --verbose
Simple enough?
By default, running func-inventory updates everything that is known
about all things func (on all minions) into a tree in
/var/lib/func/inventory.
Type "tree /var/lib/func/inventory" to see what I'm talking about.
Bonus feature: Unless you specify "--no-git", this directory is
automagically managed with git version control, so you can view
changes using tools like "git log", "gitk" (a GUI app), or (if you set
it up) GitWeb. For those unfamiliar with git, git is a powerful
distributed version control system used by the Linux kernel. It
supports writing arbitrary triggers, so you could have git email you
reports of when your configuration changes. We may include some of
those scripts with func, or we may eventually come up with some more
advanced (module-specific) triggers for func to use to report on
inventory changes.
The app also has lots of other shiny options, some of which are shown
below. You can read the "func-inventory" manpage for more details.
func-inventory --tree /opt/put/my/files/here --server-spec
"mailservers*.example.org" --modules hardware,packages --verbose
This would dump the inventory data of only your mailservers (and only
from two func modules, hardware and packages) to the directory
specified above.
One note ... Currently by default, we index all modules that have an
info() method. Since some modules change state too often to be part
of inventory, we'll most likely
have an inventory() method in the future, which will frequently be
aliased (but not always) to what info() returns now. You can also
override the methods and modules
being inventoried on the command line.
I've only lightly tested the option handling so far (testing/upgrades
to this are on the list for this week), though if anyone would like to
play with it, just install the latest func, install git-core on the
minion, and have at it.
Thanks!
--Michael
_______________________________________________
Func-list mailing list
Func-list@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/func-list
I've added some new features to make this more useful recently ...
namely "package inventory" (what RPM's are installed, and what are the
relevant version numbers, releases, etc, about them) and "service
inventory", which tells what services are enabled and also which are
running/not. Inventory now looks for an "inventory()" method by
default, so it won't attempt to take inventory of your running PID's or
anything like that.
These work with regular func commands as well as func-inventory.
Details on https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/projects/func/
Also recently alikins added support for func outputting in multiple
formats (XMLRPC, JSON, pretty print, and raw) which are all now
selectable on the command line for func.
The default is now the pretty printer.
One person on IRC suggested adding a module to remotely add a list of
files to track (probably using checksums + stat data / permissions)
which could be very useful for func inventory.
It might work very simply like:
# build up the list of things to track on various systems
func "*" call filetracker track /etc/foo.conf
func "web*.example.org" call filetracker track /etc/bar.conf
Then func-inventory could show you when those files changed, all part of
the normal git-integrated tracking report. This seems really cool to
me, especially because
it would be really easy to share all of the existing inventory
infrastructure and the diffs for any given system would show up with the
other changed inventory
items (like hardware or services).
If anyone else has other ideas for what would be neat to track with
func-inventory, please share here or on IRC. (Patches for new modules
are also
always welcome too!)
FYI -- as someone pointed out, for the hardware stuff to work, you need
to install smolt. Or alternatively you could pass in "hal_info" for the
method name to inventory and just use the hal part, sans smolt.
Baiscally this can be done just by executing func-inventory just one
more time, like this:
func-inventory
func-inventory --modules hardware --methods hal_inventory
They will combine in the same tree.
--Michael
