From: gavino
Subject: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <26325d8f-a40c-4133-ae3c-50985e7e0c06@u36g2000prf.googlegroups.com>
Is there anything like nagios done in  lisp?

-esp something SNMP aware that can build alert pages in html.....

The flexability of lisp would seem a natural fit for something like
this..

From: Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <rem-2008may13-004@yahoo.com>
> From: gavino <·········@gmail.com>
> Is there anything like nagios done in  lisp?

I never heard of it before, so I did a Google search:

   Nagios: Home
   Nagios is an enterprise-class monitoring solutions [sic] for hosts,
   services, and networks released under an Open Source license.
   www.nagios.org/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages

Is that typo a bug in Google or in nagios?

I looked around in that Web site but couldn't find what language
it's written in. The WikiPedia page for Nagios likewise doesn't
seem to state the language. But Google is my 'friend' again.
Further down the search results:

   SourceForge.net: Nagios
   Nagios is a powerful host and service monitoring program designed to
   run on most *NIX systems. It is written in C and designed to be fast
   and flexible. ...
   sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages

> The flexability of lisp would seem a natural fit for something
> like this..

Yeah, except it already has an awful lot of "bells and whistles",
especially with the large number of plug-ins already written, so
that it would take years even with Common Lisp to duplicate all
that functionality. Why bother, when there are so many new things
that could be done in CL, and so many hairbrained programming
languages that could be emulated in CL? It seems that emulating
other programming languages in CL would be better leverage than
duplicating individual applications. For that matter, somebody
could fully emulate C in CL and thereby effectively emulate Nagios
at no additional cost. Imagine an emulation of C that diagnoses
memory leaks, and data overruns, etc., and suggests changes to the
source code to fix them?? I think that could be a winner. The
emulation could be totally pedantic ANSI C, whereby if you have a
pointer that overruns one object and thereby gets access to some
other object adjacent in memory in some particular implementation
of C, which of course wouldn't work the same in another
implementation of C that allocates objects in a different
sequence in RAM, the CL emulator would tell you in
easy-to-understand langauge what exactly is going on.
From: ·······@eurogaran.com
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <9c90045f-19e0-4b52-af77-93243e819784@8g2000hse.googlegroups.com>
> It seems that emulating
> other programming languages in CL would be better leverage than
> duplicating individual applications. For that matter, somebody
> could fully emulate C in CL and thereby effectively emulate Nagios
> at no additional cost. Imagine an emulation of C that diagnoses
> memory leaks, and data overruns, etc., and suggests changes to the
> source code to fix them?? I think that could be a winner. The
> emulation could be totally pedantic ANSI C, whereby if you have a
> pointer that overruns one object and thereby gets access to some
> other object adjacent in memory in some particular implementation
> of C, which of course wouldn't work the same in another
> implementation of C that allocates objects in a different
> sequence in RAM, the CL emulator would tell you in
> easy-to-understand langauge what exactly is going on.

I've recently experimented with the Symbolics C implementation. It is
awesome.
Imagine having a [good] C interpreter.
Imagine falling into the break loop on errors.
All this was true 20 years ago. ...but it didn't catch enough
attention from the public (probably due to pricing? or due to it not
being free software? Both?).
From: =?UTF-8?B?TGFycyBSdW5lIE7DuHN0ZGFs?=
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <482a3be7$0$2329$c83e3ef6@nn1-read.tele2.net>
Robert Maas, http://tinyurl.com/uh3t wrote:
>> From: gavino <·········@gmail.com>
>> Is there anything like nagios done in  lisp?
> 
> I never heard of it before, so I did a Google search:
> 
>    Nagios: Home
>    Nagios is an enterprise-class monitoring solutions [sic] for hosts,
>    services, and networks released under an Open Source license.
>    www.nagios.org/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages
> 
> Is that typo a bug in Google or in nagios?
> 
> I looked around in that Web site but couldn't find what language
> it's written in. The WikiPedia page for Nagios likewise doesn't
> seem to state the language. But Google is my 'friend' again.
> Further down the search results:
> 
>    SourceForge.net: Nagios
>    Nagios is a powerful host and service monitoring program designed to
>    run on most *NIX systems. It is written in C and designed to be fast
>    and flexible. ...
>    sourceforge.net/projects/nagios/ - 27k - Cached - Similar pages
> 
>> The flexability of lisp would seem a natural fit for something
>> like this..
> 
> Yeah, except it already has an awful lot of "bells and whistles",
> especially with the large number of plug-ins already written, so
> that it would take years even with Common Lisp to duplicate all
> that functionality. Why bother, when there are so many new things
> that could be done in CL, and so many hairbrained programming
> languages that could be emulated in CL? It seems that emulating
> other programming languages in CL would be better leverage than
> duplicating individual applications. For that matter, somebody
> could fully emulate C in CL and thereby effectively emulate Nagios
> at no additional cost. Imagine an emulation of C that diagnoses
> memory leaks, and data overruns, etc., and suggests changes to the
> source code to fix them?? I think that could be a winner. The
> emulation could be totally pedantic ANSI C, whereby if you have a
> pointer that overruns one object and thereby gets access to some
> other object adjacent in memory in some particular implementation
> of C, which of course wouldn't work the same in another
> implementation of C that allocates objects in a different
> sequence in RAM, the CL emulator would tell you in
> easy-to-understand langauge what exactly is going on.


i think something like this would be awesome .. i think (some of)
the old lisp machines did something like this, but i'm not sure

it might enable one to slowly migrate to (maybe mostly) Lisp-only
as time passes

..Linux with all its Bash and C is "ok" .. things could be so
much better though .. (no, not C++ and/or C#)

just FFIing vs. C libraries is way too brittle imho, and never
seem to be or cover things 100%

Movitz is maybe getting TCP/IP support this summer by the way
.. and i heard there is some work on getting SBCL running "on the
bare metal" also .. with the web becoming a somewhat valid
alternative for a "real" UI -- maybe things could become
somewhat interesting as the field is "leveled" and the dependency
on C is removed :)

-- 
Lars Rune Nøstdal
http://nostdal.org/
From: Lars Rune Nøstdal
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <482b3103$0$2327$c83e3ef6@nn1-read.tele2.net>
Andreas Davour wrote:
> Lars Rune N�stdal <···········@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Movitz is maybe getting TCP/IP support this summer by the way
>> .. and i heard there is some work on getting SBCL running "on the
>> bare metal" also .. with the web becoming a somewhat valid
>> alternative for a "real" UI -- maybe things could become
>> somewhat interesting as the field is "leveled" and the dependency
>> on C is removed :)
> 
> This summer? Have Frode told you something he's working on?
> 
> Last time I looked there was TCP/IP code in the Movitz codebase.
> 
> /Andreas
> 

the fonts looks all messed up, but:
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/lispnyc/appinfo.html?csaid=5E09A0D6838F31E

-- 
Lars Rune N�stdal
http://nostdal.org/
From: Lars Rune Nøstdal
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <482c5268$0$2329$c83e3ef6@nn1-read.tele2.net>
Andreas Davour wrote:
> Lars Rune N�stdal <···········@gmail.com> writes:
> 
>> Andreas Davour wrote:
>>> Lars Rune N�stdal <···········@gmail.com> writes:
>>>
>>>> Movitz is maybe getting TCP/IP support this summer by the way
>>>> .. and i heard there is some work on getting SBCL running "on the
>>>> bare metal" also .. with the web becoming a somewhat valid
>>>> alternative for a "real" UI -- maybe things could become
>>>> somewhat interesting as the field is "leveled" and the dependency
>>>> on C is removed :)
>>> This summer? Have Frode told you something he's working on?
>>>
>>> Last time I looked there was TCP/IP code in the Movitz codebase.
>> the fonts looks all messed up, but:
>> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/lispnyc/appinfo.html?csaid=5E09A0D6838F31E
> 
> Well, like I said. Last time I looked there was TCP/IP code in the
> Movitz codebase. The filesystem driver are lacking, though.
> 
> I guess there's more this developer feels is needed to utilize the
> TCVP/IP stack.
> 
> /Andreas
> 
> 

Ok, in that case; has anyone got Swank running on Movitz?

that would certainly make the thing more "friendly" =)

-- 
Lars Rune N�stdal
http://nostdal.org/
From: ········@gmail.com
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <f2118b5d-9e37-4055-b73e-d2ce94d65197@x35g2000hsb.googlegroups.com>
On May 13, 4:08 pm, gavino <·········@gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there anything like nagios done in  lisp?
>
> -esp something SNMP aware that can build alert pages in html.....
>
> The flexability of lisp would seem a natural fit for something like
> this..

I know of at least three people working on something near to this
in CL.  Noctool (http://common-lisp.net/project/noctool/) is the only
one with actual public code, however.  The author of CL-NET-SNMP I
know from correspondence has plans for such a tool.  I'm the third,
and I'm still building up code.

For me personally I hope anything in CL written to do this will not
be like Nagios, but a good deal better than it.  There are already a
zillion monitoring tools in the world that (1) collect data via SNMP
from an application with (2) a really ugly configuration file, which
(3) make graphs with rrd and (4) page you whether something is really
wrong or not.  I swear a new one comes out every month on Freshmeat,
and all too often the biggest innovation is an eccentric redefinition
of basic monitoring vocabulary and brave, new color schemes for their
graphs.  I'm not sure we need any more of those, in any language.  For
all that I gripe about it, Nagios is probably best in breed for the
basic sorts of work it does.  There's no need to merely reproduce it.

A different approach to monitoring would be the good fit I'd most like
to see for CL, one that is analytical and predictive as much as
possible, so I know about problems *before* I start to get panicky
phone calls.

Ranting and occasional notes about work in progress on my own tool
can be found here: http://www.biostat.wisc.edu/~annis/granny/ - I'm
far
from releasing anything, and may never.  I'm still investigating
different ways to use all that data SNMP hands out, mostly involving
statistical models.  Until my own brave, new system is read, I rely
on Nagios for the basics.

--
wm
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: lisp website monitoring tool?
Date: 
Message-ID: <6c4ab1dd-c0d9-4698-a2b6-1e55af77b9b7@34g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>
On May 14, 3:44 am, ·········@gmail.com" <········@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> For me personally I hope anything in CL written to do this will not
> be like Nagios, but a good deal better than it.  There are already a
> zillion monitoring tools in the world [...]
> I'm not sure we need any more of those, in any language.  For
> all that I gripe about it, Nagios is probably best in breed for the
> basic sorts of work it does.  There's no need to merely reproduce it.

That's an important point.  The interesting bit isn't getting the
dsta, and I'd regard Lisp tools to get the data as besically
reinventing the wheel.  No, the interesting bit is looking through the
data and doing something useful with it.  "Useful" generally means
"making it suitable for human consumption", which means finding the
interesting, and only the interesting stuff.  That's a mostly open
problem I think, although tools like Splunk (not free) are making
progress.

--tim (who used to live with several hundred Nagios alerts a day)