Keeping track of a lot of machines - sitesummary

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

To make it easier to keep track of a lot of machines, by having them
report in to a central point about their existence, I've written
sitesummary.  It is similar to a system we use at the university to
keep track of our 2000 unix machines.

It consist of a server part and a client part, and uses HTTP POST to
submit the information to the server.  I've created
<URL:http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/HowTo/SiteSummary> to document
the installation procedure.  The system is still in early development,
but is already able to keep track of thin clients, servers and work
stations.

The source is in alioth svn, and I welcome help, patches etc.  To give
you an idea about the current state, here are some reports for the
four skolelinux.no machines currently reporting into my test server.
It is not really intended for four machines, it is more useful when
the number of machines moves above 50, but it give some idea:

  site                 count
  USIT                     4

  kernel               count
  2.4.27                   1
  2.6.16-2-686-smp         1
  2.6.8-3-686-smp          2

The site part is a string stored in /etc/sitesummary/site on each
machine, and can be used to track on which school or building the
machine is located, or something else if it is wanted.

Setting up the server is still not as streamlines as I would like it
to be.  Please update the wiki with clues to make it easier.

I intend to integrate this system into the default debian-edu setup
when the package stabilizes.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen