On Fri, 2008-09-12 at 10:39 +0200, Morten Brekkevold wrote:
What cases do we have for host lookup in IP Info?
a) Host unknown to NAV (example: 129.241.93.17)
- ipinfo: Shows DNS information.
- ipdevinfo: Shows DNS information.
b) Host known to NAV (example: voldsminde)
- ipinfo: Links to devBrowser. Shows DNS, subnet, vlan, org. Shows ARP and MAC data, and where least seen (switch,module,port).
- ipdevinfo: Shows everything devBrowser does (soon), DNS, subnet, vlan, org. Does not show ARP, MAC, last seen.
c) Host known to NAV and matching rule sin the "local output configuration" (i.e. usage=='sby')
- ipinfo: Same as for b) and additional links to external systems as decided by configuration.
- ipdevinfo: Same as for b).
Any cases I've forgotten, misunderstood or which are incomplete?
Nothing? I'm a bit surprised if I have an approximately complete understanding of IP Info already. Lets get back to it when I'll start working on replacing IP Info.
For case b), ipdevinfo can get the missing data quite easily.
For case c), if one can live without this feature either permanently or hidden from the toolbox for some time, we can surely remove the ipinfo tool from the toolbox without linking to it at all. Alternatively, one could link to ipinfo from the "Actions" list in ipdevinfo until this last ipinfo feature are added to ipdevinfo.
For 3.5.0, I vote for your alternative solution. That is, if the actions list is also present when searching for a host unknown to NAV.
Fixed, for both known and unknown hosts.
Some of the information (arp/mac/lastseen) displayed by ipinfo is downright confusing to some, since there can be an absolute mismatch between the arp and cam records used in the display. The arp record could be five weeks old, while the cam record is current, meaning that the IP is not active and the machine that last had it now probably has a different IP altogether.
The only reason all this information was mashed together in a single view was to enable the local output configuration, which can use all the variables from an ipinfo page to construct its output.
So, I should not add any of these (arp/mac/lastseen) to the IP device view?
NTNU will definitely miss the local output configuration. They need it to link to an external web application which contains information about the dormitory address a switchport is patched through to, and a record of which student lives at that address.
The ipinfo tool was originally written as a generic means to achieve this functionality.
I'll leave this as is until devBrowser is completely replaced.
What we've previously discussed is to rewrite this local output configuration feature into something more specific. The idea is to implement some sort of hook or configuration ability into NAV, which will enable a NAV administrator to define templates for linking to external information about a given port.
It should also be possible to define what criteria need to be present for a template to be used and displayed. Using the specific example from NTNU's needs, a link to said external web application should be displayed if a port is on a specific set of subnets which belong to the student dormitories.
I think we'll have to discuss this a bit when I'm ready to start working on it.
Candidate pages for displaying such a link is the port details view in ipdevinfo, and result rows in the machine tracker (the latter is a request from NTNU because they don't want to click through from the machine tracker to the port details page to find the link).
Both seems reasonable.