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     RE: nocol-users mozbot talks to nocol

This presents a good idea for a NOCOL messaging system.  Has anyone any
experience with a CORBA server?  Perhaps this would be a good platform for
such a system since some are free.

Thank you,

Jonathan A. Zdziarski
Director - MIS
NetRail, inc.
230 Peachtree St.
Suite 1700
Atlanta, GA 30303
404-522-5400 x240


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nocol-users@navya.com [mailto:owner-nocol-users@navya.com]On
> Behalf Of Velocet
> Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 1999 4:32 PM
> To: nocol-users@navya.com
> Subject: nocol-users mozbot talks to nocol
>
>
> Well, mozbot listens to nocol anyway. ;)
>
> Good timing on releasing the SQL status database, JUST as I finish coding,
> d'oh!
>
> At any rate, my company hangs out in irc alot, so that people dont have to
> yell from office to office, and when people are at remote sites or
> telecommuting, we can maintain conversations without having people
> interupting eachother with phone calls. We even have some savvy customers
> trained to bother us in a client channel too. ;) Of course we
> have our own irc
> servers.
>
> We sometimes dont notice that some nocol state is changing before we get a
> huge number of pages. Even so, our paging system (the telco) can be
> unreliable. I want to ensure we do NOT miss any alert statuses in
> nocol. And
> in fact, I want a subset of nocol states to be flagged in some way without
> resorting to the cumbersome and intrusive pager system.  If someone is
> around on the irc, they can go fix it, when its in error or warning state,
> because its not worth paging someone who's out visiting relatives on the
> weekend, though it should eventually be fixed. Email is also unreliable in
> terms of WHEN people read it, as well as their powers of ignoring
> important
> email. ;)
>
> So for us, IRC seems like a good place to give alerts on things that
> we consider not ever worthy of a critical flag. (A good example
> is diskspace. We consider 98-99% to be critical on most our systems
> because they have 20-50 gigs on most of them now. Having 'only' 1 gig
> free is not an emergency. So its not worth it to page someone because
> disk space is in error state. But its worth it to indicate it in irc.
>
> I am still tweaking it a bit, and will be done in a day or two,
> and will be handing out urls then.
>
> Just wondering what else people want added to this while Im at it.
>
> Right now I have this coded and working:
>
> - reporting changes to any state (from I to W/E/C or back to I)
>
> - allowing user to request output of any state to channel or back
> in private
>    /msg (I do not allow a full INFO report back in channels)
>
> I am going to tweak this a bit to allow a simple limit - even I can see
> now how much state fluctuates - I NEVER noticed this before. Its kinda
> interesting - but its alot of traffic in some ways, with every warning
> popping up and disappearing another 2-3 minutes later. I can make a limit
> so that only Errors or full Critical status are reported.
>
> I am trying to get the exception stuff working a bit better now, to allow
> the bot to report on and insert exceptions much as the web interface does.
> However, the web interface exceptions do NOT seem to be sticking for me
> (on subsequent reload they're gone). I think there's a permission problem
> writing to disk, but the exceptions file is owned by the same user that
> owns the apache process. Strange.
>
> I am also going to allow the user to request a report of all
> states (below a
> certain level) from a specific machine, or all states (below a certain
> level) of a trait ('varname') from all machines. Or one specific machine's
> state for a certain trait.
>
> The one last thing I think we need is to allow a nag config to be setup so
> that a periodic nagging over an existing state can be reiterated again
> (currently the bot only volonteers info on state changes). I can also
> allow (a) target user(s) to be nagged specifically about various problems.
>
> A variation of that is allowing different levels of reporting for
> different
> targets: changes to/from "critical" only to the channel, and error
> to all the admins via private /msg, and 'warning' to the jr admins only
> via /msg. Hmm this could come in VERY handy. (/me grabs his whip with
> the jr admin's name on it.)
>
> Mozbot is from the mozilla project, and I've neutered a bunch of its
> functions (the tinderbox compilation engine reporting for eg)
> since they're
> specific to the Mozilla groups' desires. However, it maintains a few
> interesting things such as reporting slashdot and freshmeat headlines
> as they appear, et al. (These can be removed easily as well.)
>
> The next 'version' of this may see this bot cleaned up MASSIVELY, because
> the original code was a travesty. :) As well, I will be
> interfacing with the
> new SQL database to get a report of state once I get that working.
>
> Here's a sample of my current output:
>
> <m:#baz>  hadrian.velocet  NetOErr=7 chg:I from W (since 12/21 16:04)
> <m:#baz>  water.planeteer  NetColl=0 chg:I from W (since 12/21 16:14)
>
> (oh the output string can be configured as well)
>
> /kc
> --
> Ken Chase, Director Operations                  Velocet
> Communications Inc.
> math@velocet.ca
> Toronto CANADA
> --
> "Sometimes two [harmless] words, when put together, strike fear in the
>   hearts of men -- Microsoft Wallet."                           -
> Dave Gilbert
>