[Samba] Directly Get CTDB or SMB Status/Stats?

[Martin Schwenke]

Hi Bob,

On Tue, 20 Oct 2020 19:03:03 -0400, Robert Buck via samba
<samba at lists.samba.org> wrote:

> Is there a way to get CTDB or Samba status/stats w/o forking a process? I
> am looking into writing Prometheus exporters for these. I'd prefer to make
> a "C" call in Golang than fork a process and scrape STDOUT. What are my
> options?

I can answer the CTDB part...

CTDB's protocol implementation is currently in the ctdb/protocol/
subdirectory of the Samba tree.  However, there is no separate client
library for building something outside the Samba source tree.  Apart
from technical logistics you would need to be careful with licensing
(i.e. GPL).

One compromise would be to either:

* Add long lived helper into the CTDB source that would make the
  requests and process the results for you.  You could run it once and
  talk to it via pipes, a socket or similar.

* A cheaper hack compared to the above might be to add an interactive
  mode to the current ctdb command-line tool (ctdb/tools/ctdb.c).

  I can see how this might be done.  The simplest way avoids the
  per-command fork but would open a new client connection via the Unix
  domain socket for each command.

  This would require scraping results from stdout but the -X option
  will help a lot with that for the important commands.

  In the longer term this is planned as part of a rewrite of the tool
  as part of restructuring.

peace & happiness,
martin