Hi Holger, Please forgive me for the delay (hum hum...) > Well, I invested some energy and time, and here is a URL: > > http://sites.inka.de/penti/cgi-bin/lmsensor.pl As someone asked to me today if such a system existed and it took me 15 minutes to find the URL back, I have been adding a section for motherboard configuration file databases in our "useful addresses" document. http://www2.lm-sensors.nu/~lm78/cvs/lm_sensors2/doc/useful_addresses.html#sensorsconfdb > It is still a prototype and regrettably uploading sensor.confs does > not work on that webserver. (It did work at home, I suspect that the > CGI.pm and/or perl are too old on that machine). I just tried and actually it failed. I was able to create an entry for my motherboard maker, my motherboard model, but the configuration file upload failed. This definitely needs fixing (or at least a workaround), else this database is useless. Can't you upgrade CGI.pm or perl or fix whatever is causing the problem? You could easily do without the upload, BTW. Just add a large text area on the page, and let the user copy/paste in it. It might be less convenient than upload, but better than a non-working upload. > The stuff is just one perl script using CGI.pm and a C executable I > compiled with some internals of the latest sensors lib (I wanted to > make sure configs are valid when I store them). It's probably overkill to use C and stuff from libsensors to do this. I understand that some check of the file is needed so as to make sure that people don't upload crap, but that should be very easy to do something simple in perl. > It stores uploaded files striped down (only valid tags, no comments) > and compressed. Stripping the comments is a very bad idea if you want my opinion. Comments in sensors.conf files are very useful, you are removing most of the added value if you remove them. Take a look at the configuration file I published for my motherboard: http://khali.linux-fr.org/devel/lm-sensors/sensors-Gigabyte-K8V-Ultra-939.conf You'll see it has pretty useful comments. Strip them down, and the file is not even worth being left online. Also, even with all the comments, not compressed, the file is less than 4 kB in size. I wouldn't expect such a database to grow larger than 2000 files (and I am being very optimistic), this would be around 8 MB of data. By today's standards it is not much, and at any rate not enough to justify stripping, and possibly not even compression. > I am thinking about how to add the possibility to sign configurations > (like someone who uses one of the configs and it works for him, he > could sign it somehow (pgp?)). Overkill IMHO. All we need is a place where people can upload configurations and others can download them. We don't need this to be official or anything. > Could you spare the time to have a look at it? I would appreciate your > feedback very much! Well, I just gave it a try, and found that the process to add a configuration file was rather long, due to the fact that the addition of the manufacturer and the model are separate steps. You should be able to do it all in one flow: 1* Select motherboard maker OR add it if it doesn't exist. 2* Select motherboard model OR add it if it doesn't exist. 3* Upload the configuration file. Also, you should have comments on what fields are used for what. It looks to me like only the "long" motherboard maker and product names are used. What are the short ones for? Internal use? Can't they be filled in automatically from the long names? Put in short, you have to consider the interface from the eyes of the random user who wants to upload a configuration file. He/she must not have to wonder what is what, and the operation must be as straightforward as possible, that is, fill in fields and click OK a couple of times, and that's all. Else, nobody will add data and the base will be useless. Thanks, -- Jean Delvare
