On Friday 25 January 2008 02:18:37 Shea, Graeme A wrote:
First, thankyou Henrik for such a great product.
A Windows port of Hobbit Server would be fantastic for us. We are almost
purely a Windows shop and it's just not going to change. I settled on BB
purely because it was the only one I found that had a Windows port, did
what we wanted (at the time) and we could run it free under the BTF
licence. I discovered Hobbit purely by accident fairly recently. It gave
enough advantages (mainly ongoing support and development) that the
"main" server is now a Hobbit/Ubuntu/VMWare Virtual Server running on
one of the Windows boxes. This is our only Linux install. I chose Ubuntu
because of it reputation for ease of use for us non Linux people. The
clients are still BB though I have started to modify our custom scripts
to enable us to use BBWin. I will be using BB for a long time because I
have 7 sites non of them could really be called a main site. Each site
has it own BB server and is stand alone forwarding the information to
the Hobbit server. Since Hobbit cant forward and display at the same
time I cant use it. The capability to run another virtual machine is
also questionable at some sites.
The next best thing to a windows port would be a MS and/or VMWare
virtual server image with everything needed, loaded and going including
a GUI and a easy to use GUI text editor.
We run a mostly Unix shop. However, an other group in our company approached
us because they needed to monitor about 100 network devices, and didn't have
a budget for any software. However, they had bought a PC for management
purposes.
I installed Mandriva 2008.0, the included Hobbit and devmon packages, and a
backported cacti (for the weathermap plugin which is not in the 2008.0
package), and (even though they didn't use it) a TACACS+ server (tac_plus)
and rancid (also shipped in Mandriva 2008.0 contrib).
I added shortcuts on the desktop (e.g. one to run 'sudo
kate /etc/hobbit/bb-hosts'), and they had a comprehensive monitoring and
management station in 45 minutes work start-to-finish.
I know this is almost heresy for those whose professional lives have
been heavily devoted to open source and Linux but it is the reality for
us and I'm sure we are not alone.
Maybe there is more benefit to you finding what *other* tools will run on a
Unix machine in your environment ...
Regards,
Buchan