Example report config put this line in cron to run nightly wait for the mail, check your website be sure sources are in your web directory.

So you'll recive a report-- however you might get it--and it'll contain any sort of info, like general net health, or specific node broken packages, or... whatever. You choose. This will help you correct your configuratin file, and audit things, and fix any nodes that got all hosed.

The BCFG2 Reporting System consists of a number of elements. The core is the StatReports Executable. StatReports reads a default configuration file (or a config file specified on the command line) then prepares and delivers the reports specified in the configuration file. It is expected that this executable will be run by the adminstrator periodically via CRON or similar facilty. The executable can also be run manually on demand for a special sort of report that needs to be generated immediately. StatReports gets the data it reports from a number of sources. The hostinfo.xml file is specific to the reporting system and generated by the executable python script "GenerateHostInfo." Hostinfo.xml contains information about if a host is currently pingable or not, and a mapping of short hostnames to FQDNs. GenerateHostInfo will be run automatically by StatReports if the hostinfo.xml file is older than 23.5 hours. This number is chosen, because it is likely an administrator will recieve reports daily about the status of hosts and if they had run BCFG the previous night. It is possible to execute GenerateHostInfo to update the hostinfo.xml file at any interval via cron, but it does take some time to complete, so be sure to give it a few minutes. This will only likely be of use if your BCFG clients are set to update more often than nightly and you would like reports after each run. The next place StatReports gets data from is the statistics.xml file. This file is maintained by bcfgd, and is updated whenever a client updates, therefore is always up to date, and no maintainence is required on this file. Finally StatReports is able to get any information out of the Metadata.xml file. This will likely be most useful in the future where the range of reports will include auditing style reports, that must include configuration information.

There are a number of report types, and a number of delivery styles. It is expected that reports be laid out around a group of machines. For any group of machines it can be defined that there be any number of reports generated, with different options. For each of those reports, each can be delivered by Mail, WWW, or via RSS (or any combination of the three.) In the future, additional report types will be added, and if necessary, additional types of deliveries will be created. Here is a list of the report types currently defined. Overview-Stats This report provides informatoin about a large number of machines and their states. It is often found to be useful when the group of machines it is connected with is simply All Nodes, which gives an overall outlook on your network's health. It makes sense to get this report via any mechanism Nodes-Digest This is a report that includes details about each node, specifically what packages, files, etc are broken, and other node specific info. It makes sense to recieve this via any mechanism Nodes-Individual This report includes details about each node, but information is separated in to separate sections (such as separate e-mails or RSS articles) before sending. This works well with e-mail filters and error detection. Currently WWW is not a supported delivery mechanism for this type of report, because it is not completely clear how such a report could be used. Here is a list of possible delivery mechanisms. www This delivery produces HTML reports which can be delivered via the WWW. it is important that you copy the directory: install-root/share/bcfg2/reports/web-rprt-srcs in to the same directory as you will be serving web pages from. It includes CSS and JavaScript files necessary to properly view the www files. rss This delivery type also should be written to some area that is likely web accessable. It is plain Rss-- One Caveat-- the "Article Link" does not actually point to any web information, because it is not clear that a corresponding web page exists for any given rss article. mail Mail is simple plaintext e-mail that is sent to the specified recipients directly from the machine on which BCFG is running by opening a pipe to sendmail.

How to setup the config file, how to setup groups of machines http://docs.python.org/lib/re-syntax.html How to write your own reports