Web page to subscribe to Hobbit email alerts
list Shawn Maschino
Hello follow Hobbit admins (hobmins?). I'm fairly new to the list but have been running Hobbit for a while now. I've had a request come to me to put a web page together to let people register for getting Hobbit email alerts. It would just need to allow someone to select a server (or servers), the tests they want alerts for, and then enter their email address. When they submit the form it would automatically add a line in hobbit-alerts.cfg so they would get the alerts. It wouldn't need to be anything fancy, or support unsubscribing to alerts (although that would be nice). Before I tried my hand at hacking together something to do this I thought I'd check if anyone here has something already since it seemed like this probably has come up for someone before. I took a look at the code for the Enable/Disable alerts cgi page and thought I may be able to use that as a starting point, but if anyone here has already done something like this and wouldn't mind sharing it would be appreciated. Thanks! Shawn Maschino Technical Services - Server Operations GE Plastics user-518eb92a87d3@xymon.invalid
list Jeff Stoner
On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 16:46 -0500, Maschino, Shawn (GE Advanced
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Hello follow Hobbit admins (hobmins?). I’m fairly new to the list but have been running Hobbit for a while now. I’ve had a request come to me to put a web page together to let people register for getting Hobbit email alerts. It would just need to allow someone to select a server (or servers), the tests they want alerts for, and then enter their email address. When they submit the form it would automatically add a line in hobbit-alerts.cfg so they would get the alerts.
It would probably be much easier to manage this through your mailer than with Hobbit. A couple thoughts: - have script edit the /etc/mail/aliases (or whatever your mail handling program uses) - set up a user account, configure procmail with that account then have your script modify that Considerations: 1. The first approach above would possibly require root privs somewhere along the line (either modifying the file or rebuilding the aliases database) Again, this depends entirely on your mail handling software. 2. Approach number 2 helps isolate failures with malformed email addresses to the procmail facility. When Hobbit gets an alert, it will never be adversely affected by a bad email address. Procmail might so you need to be careful writing the .procmailrc file. 3. Editing the hobbit-alerts.cfg directly from a cgi script leaves you vulnerable. People screw up. If they screw up bad enough, they could really futz up your alerting which would be a really Bad Thing(tm) all around. Avoid doing this if possible, especially when you may not know who is utilizing your system. A better solution would be to use a listserv. There are several mailing list software packages out there that can be employed...which would provide: - possibly a web interface already exists for people to subscribe/unsucscribe (why reinvent the wheel?) - the ability to make a moderated list so people couldn't spam everyone else unnecessarily (think: Out of Office notices or bounce messages) - archiving of the alerts for auditing purposes - more clear division between alerting by Hobbit and mail handling by the list software Choose your fate. -- --Jeff "Go to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."
list Shawn Maschino
Thanks Jeff, I didn't think of those alternatives. They could work out better, and be easier to set up, I'm all up for that!
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Stoner [mailto:user-e519abf6e436@xymon.invalid]
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 9:42 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Web page to subscribe to Hobbit email alerts
On Wed, 2005-11-09 at 16:46 -0500, Maschino, Shawn (GE Advanced Hello follow Hobbit admins (hobmins?). I'm fairly new to the list but have been running Hobbit for a while now. I've had a request come to me to put a web page together to let people register for getting Hobbit email alerts. It would just need to allow someone to select a server (or servers), the tests they want alerts for, and then enter their email address. When they submit the form it would automatically add a line in hobbit-alerts.cfg so they would get the alerts.
It would probably be much easier to manage this through your mailer than with Hobbit. A couple thoughts: - have script edit the /etc/mail/aliases (or whatever your mail handling program uses) - set up a user account, configure procmail with that account then have your script modify that Considerations: 1. The first approach above would possibly require root privs somewhere along the line (either modifying the file or rebuilding the aliases database) Again, this depends entirely on your mail handling software. 2. Approach number 2 helps isolate failures with malformed email addresses to the procmail facility. When Hobbit gets an alert, it will never be adversely affected by a bad email address. Procmail might so you need to be careful writing the .procmailrc file. 3. Editing the hobbit-alerts.cfg directly from a cgi script leaves you vulnerable. People screw up. If they screw up bad enough, they could really futz up your alerting which would be a really Bad Thing(tm) all around. Avoid doing this if possible, especially when you may not know who is utilizing your system. A better solution would be to use a listserv. There are several mailing list software packages out there that can be employed...which would provide: - possibly a web interface already exists for people to subscribe/unsucscribe (why reinvent the wheel?) - the ability to make a moderated list so people couldn't spam everyone else unnecessarily (think: Out of Office notices or bounce messages) - archiving of the alerts for auditing purposes - more clear division between alerting by Hobbit and mail handling by the list software Choose your fate. -- --Jeff "Go to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200."