web server in Samba4

[James Peach]

On Wed, Jun 01, 2005 at 09:22:55AM +1000, Andrew Bartlett wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 09:05 +1000, James Peach wrote:
> > On Sun, May 29, 2005 at 01:18:24PM +1000, Andrew Tridgell wrote:
> > > Support for web administration in Samba4 is starting to take shape, so
> > > I thought it might be worthwhile to outline some design decisions here
> > > in case anyone has any comments.
> > > 
> > > The main aims are:
> > > 
> > >   - create a web administration interface that is good enough that
> > >     everyone wants to use it. It should not just be an interface for
> > >     inexperienced admins, it should be something that everyone
> > >     (including team members) finds the best way of working with the
> > >     server.
> > > 
> > >   - make sure it is trivial to use, while being secure.
> > > 
> > >   - provide a much richer interface than the Samba3 SWAT tool. It
> > >     should be more like the typical 'NAS' interfaces that vendors tend
> > >     to wrap around Samba, with admin and monitoring interfaces.
> > 
> > What's your thinking WRT monitoring interfaces? Will there be a general
> > performance/state monitoring infrastructure in Samba4?
> 
> This is certainly one of the things I would like to see exposed by the
> web interface.  Particularly if it can be in the kind of format to feed
> into mrtg.

I suggest that this information be exposed in a more general way so that
it is useable by more consumers than just the web interface.

One way we have done this successfully in the past is to write a PCP
agent to export the performance metrics. It's reasonably
straightforward to then build web-based monitoring tools (or any other
sort) on top of this. We have done this and I know of other sites who
have done the same independently. It would be quite straightforward to
write a PCP client that generates MRTG format.

In response to Alan's SNMP suggestion, the PCP infrastructure provides
metric archiving, data reduction, plugin extensibility and a lot of
other useful features over and above raw SNMP.

The PCP home page <http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/> has more info.

-- 
James Peach | jpeach at sgi.com | SGI Australian Software Group
I don't speak for SGI.