On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:11 PM, Gustavo Niemeyer <gustavo@niemeyer.net> wrote:
> I'm one of the developers working on the Landscape project at
> Canonical[1]. Recently we've started working on a tool, so far named
> landscape-sysinfo, which will be used to display some dynamic
> information next to the MOTD message during logins.

Related to this, Gustavo and I had a conversation in IRC about a few
different ways of gathering and displaying that information.

Basically, we considered two different options...
1) Updating the MOTD itself
2) Running the scripts on each login

There are clearly advantages and disadvantages to each approach,
depending on the profile of a system. The implementation may well
employ a combination of the two approaches, or provide administrators
with an option between the two.

To that end, I have created a new package, update-motd.

It's currently under review at:
* http://revu.ubuntuwire.com/details.py?package=update-motd

And installable from my PPA:
* https://launchpad.net/~kirkland/+archive

To some extent, it's a more generalized version of the mythtv-status
package, which appends statistical information about your mythtv
backed server to /etc/motd.

update-motd, on the other hand, creates an /etc/update-motd.d/
directory, where users or other packages can drop scripts. These
scripts will be run on a regular basis, in lexical order, by
run-parts. The interval at which they are run is configurable in
/etc/default/update-motd, defaulting to every 10 minutes. Clearly,
that value would need to be tuned according to a system
administrator's preferences. The output of each script is
concatenated with /etc/motd.tail and written to /etc/motd.

Between /etc/profile.d, and /etc/update-motd.d, there would be two
different viable options for running the Landscape sysinfo scripts.

--
:-Dustin

Dustin Kirkland
Ubuntu Server Developer
Canonical, LTD
kirkland@canonical.com
GPG: 1024D/83A61194

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I'd say some information about:

Host Contact person: <name>
Applications hosted: <app1> <app2> <app3>

would be good ? Thats at least what a sysadmin would be more interested
in. Enterprise size stuff got other tools for gathering performance.

/Erik


On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 16:11 -0300, Gustavo Niemeyer wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm one of the developers working on the Landscape project at
> Canonical[1]. Recently we've started working on a tool, so far named
> landscape-sysinfo, which will be used to display some dynamic
> information next to the MOTD message during logins.
>
> The goal of this tool is to provide the administrator a basic overview
> of how the system is running. To give a basic feeling of what it is
> about, a rough mockup follows. Please note that we don't even know
> yet which of these details will be available, and how they will be
> actually worded.
>
> System load: 1.15 Processes: 1500
> Memory usage: 65% Temperature: 74 C
> Swap usage: None Users logged on: 1 (you)
>
> => Zombie processes were found alive.
> => Disk usage on /home is above 90%.
> => This machine is being affected by USNs 123, 456 and 789.
>
> The headers at the top will always be present, while notes at the
> bottom will report outstanding events.
>
> So the question is: what information would you find useful to look at
> during logins, to get an idea of how things are going in your servers?
>
> We obviously can't include too much information because we're limited
> to a reasonable amount of space, so it'd be very useful if any ideas
> were accompanied by the motivation, as that would help us to figure
> together which are the most interesting ones.
>
> Thank you very much.
>
> [1] http://landscape.canonical.com
>
> --
> Gustavo Niemeyer
> http://niemeyer.net
>

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