Hey, talexb, you are prescient. The administrators of our network do run nagios, but they don't expose much of the interface to the users. I have no admin privileges. My collegaues expressed that a program that helped them pick which of our common-use machines to use at any given time would be very helpful. I had no idea if or what the admin people had that might be similar. So I built a system. At first, it was a shell command that automatically logged the user on to the machine with the lowest load and opened an instance of emacs. Since the information that program used was stored in a file (collected every five minutes by polling the machines in question), I created a web page that displayed the stats.

Several users got pretty psyched about the web page. I guess they run a lot of heavy duty Monte Carlo simulations.

Since I got positive feedback I've been working on an upgrade that uses a DB back end and stores minutely status data for the 18 machines. Eventually I hope to be able to create historical graphs of the data. The admin folks do have something similar, but don't advertise it.

The reason I say you're prescient is because I was poking around just today and found a shell command someone wrote that basically wgets a nagios web page displaying a list of hosts that looks something like 

host1 is UP
host2 is DOWN
etc.
I have no idea how timely that data is or how it's created.

I don't generally track how quickly the hosts respond to the pings, I just needed to make sure they were up before I tried to ssh to them and execute the script that collected and reported the statistics. I was going to say I don't care, but now that you mention it, it does seem (and this is pure speculation based on anecdotal evidence) that the machines that have a higher load tend to take longer to reply and to return the stats. That info might be worth recording. Sort of like finding the best Counterstrike server!

I like computer programming because it's like Legos for the mind.

In reply to Re^2: I thought I found a good reason to use backticks in a void context, but I was wrong. by OfficeLinebacker
in thread I thought I found a good reason to use backticks in a void context, but I was wrong. by OfficeLinebacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.