I’ve been thinking about integrating system tools for a long time and it has always seemed like there should be some standard way of getting system tools to talk to each other. In general, they exchange pretty simplistic information like logs, metrics, and alerts, and it should not be that hard to come up with a generic way for tools to exchange and consume this information.
It’s been a plan of mine to support the integration of Puppet with tools like Nagios, and any other system management tool. My attendance at the got me thinking about using Microformats to encode the information but I’d have computers talking directly to each other with no browsers in the middle.
In the course of thinking about this, spike on #puppet on irc.freenode.net brought up integration between Puppet and Trac. I’ve posted a log of that conversation, but the summary of it is that we need a message bus for integrating the different system administration tools. Ian seems to have said it first: “a programmatic message bus is one of the big missing pieces in system administration”. Already there was discussion of SMTP, Jabber, Microformats, XML-RPC, event routers, and most of the other things that we’ve decided are now a part of Runnels.
A few days later, I decided to see if I could spur some discussion on the on this topic, and I seem to have succeeded. The main conclusions from the conversation were that this would be great to have, it could not use SMTP, and maybe something like Jabber’s protocol would work well.
That discussion wore down after a few hours, and we took it back to IRC, where we came up with the name “Runnels”.
A day or so later, it came up on IRC again, and we were able to pretty well characterize the problem, including coming up with a list of definitions.
We discussed much else, but we only really agreed that our message format is a plain text collection of name/value pairs, the definitions already linked to, and the fact that we want to use subscriptions to get messages rather than having messages record a destination.
We later had a discussion on semantic tagging.
/projects/puppet
http://www.nagios.org/
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/
http://web2con.com/
http://www.microformats.org
http://www.edgewall.com/trac/
runnelsstart
http://www.google.com/search?q=message+bus
http://ian.blenke.com/
http://config.sage.org
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.configuration-management.users/81
characterization
nameorigin
definitions
semanticlog$Id: history.page 6 2006-07-02 20:05:14Z luke $