Author Archives: Alastair Scobie
Inventory project progress
A presentation on progress on the Inventory Project was given at the 5th April development meeting. The slides are available here.
Clientreport and PostgreSQL’s JSONB datatype
I’m a real convert to the JSONB data type. We’re using this to store the JSON clientreports submitted by each client. Using JSON allows us to trivially add more information (eg extra reports) and then make queries against both the … Continue reading
Inventory – REST api
As reported in the previous blog item, an important element of the new inventory system will be the RESTful API. Currently, the invquery and invedit commands use SQL directly to perform queries and updates. This has integrity “issues”, means that … Continue reading
Inventory status – May 2016
The Inventory project was effectively stalled for January to March, to release effort to work on the SL7 Server base project. In an attempt to improve focus on this project, a deadline of end of 2016 has been set for … Continue reading
Inventory project – status (November 2015)
In the last few months, the following progress has been made on the Inventory project :- Orders file processing The format of order files has been “formalised” and documented A new parser library has been produced, code reviewed and tested … Continue reading
Detecting monitors (for the clientreport script)
The current clientreport script uses a rather crude method to determine the monitor connected to a DICE desktop. It greps through /var/log/Xorg.0.log to pick out the monitor model name, serial number and year of manufacture. Whilst this has worked for … Continue reading
Harvesting MAC addresses
The clientreport script of the current inventory system only reports on one MAC address, and even then simply derives this from the dhclient.mac resource. As we intend, in the new inventory system, for the clientreport script to be the principal … Continue reading
Inventory clientreport via kerberised CGI using host key principal
For many, many, years, DICE desktops and servers have submitted a daily report to the Informatics inventory system. This report, known as ‘clientreport’, includes details such as the model type, the running kernel, the amount of physical memory, the time … Continue reading
How to boot under F12
Fedora made a big noise about moving to Upstart from the old SysVinit system. But, in reality, they haven’t really. OK, Upstart’s init daemon is being used, and this starts Upstart “jobs” in /etc/event.d, but only a handful of services … Continue reading
LCFG installroot – groan, no Union FS in Fedora
I had been hoping to use a combination of a union filesystem (UnionFS or AUFS) with something like SquashFS for the new LCFG installroot, with writes going to the initramfs. However the stock Fedora 12 kernel doesn’t include any kind … Continue reading
Shrinking the LCFG installroot
Have recently started to look at re-engineering the LCFG installroot. One of the main aims of the project is to remove the need to run with ROOT_NFS. The current PXE installroot system mounts the whole LCFG installroot over NFS and … Continue reading