Data storage

[Jeff Bailey]

(Thanks to Elenore for chatting with me about this)

I've been thinking a bit about how I will handle data storage in
Radar.

Essentially the problems are:

1) A mix of different data.

2) Need to lookup hosts by either MAC Address or IP Address (Well,
network address, but let's keep thinking in terms of IPv4 for now)

3) A collection of different nodes need to be able to feed information
into this datastore.

4) 3rd party tools should be able to query the datastore using ODBC.

The best solutions appears to be to normalize everything to SNMP.  I
will write away to get an OID assigned to Radar (GNU already has one,
so I will just get a subclass from that).  Then any new data needs
(sotring configuration files, or other information) can get stored
that way.

It also means that a module collecting information usually available
by SNMP can fill on those variables in a uniform way (As in, if a host
doesn't support SNMP, and you're using a script to query uptime, your
script should reformulate the data in terms of /existing/ data
structures and submit it to the central store).

(Incidentally the working title for this is "command centre", or "cc"
for short)

CC will backend to a database eventually.  For now, because I need to
work out tables and stuff (hopefully with Jamu's help when he comes
back - He's much better with relational databases than I am), I'll
just store in flatfiles.

Tks,
Jeff Bailey

-- 
 One of the great things about books is sometimes
 there are some fantastic pictures.
 -- George W. Bush