[et-mgmt-tools] Cimbiote methods

[Michael DeHaan]

Bart Baars wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> For a project at the dutch tax-office, we are planning to use CIM. Our
> primairy goal is to be able to start/stop services that have a script in
> /etc/init.d. Unfortunatly, we haven't been able to find a MOF/provider 
> that
> is able to do this for us. So we decided to write our own.
>
> We want to use Cimbiote for this. The example you wrote 
> (example_plugin.py)
> is pretty clear, except for the methods. I believe there are tho
> methods, set and get_array_element, and they both require some args.
>
> I am trying to access the method using this command:
>
> # wbemcli cm
> 'http://localhost/root/cimv2:ExamplePlugin.Filename="file-9.txt"'
> get_array_element
>
> This returns "a general error occured, not covered by more specific code",
> and I should check some logs. I have tried various options for the method
> invocation, but I never get a valid response. Can you give me an 
> example of
> how to execute this method?
>
> Regards,
>
> Bart
>
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Wow, a post about Cimbiote :)   I'm happy and sad at the same time.   
You're basically the first person who has asked about it.    Cimbiote is 
now largely unmaintained, and I should update the web page to indicate 
we are looking for a new owner.    I would really like to see someone 
who is well connected with CIM development help continue it.

At the time when it was written we saw a lot of large company interest 
in CIM and wanted to help out in making writing providers easier for 
those that were not CIM experts -- writing CIM providers is way too 
painful, and documentation is scarce.     Standardized interfaces, we 
thought, were definitely a good idea, but the problem was these 
standards were overcomplicated and that created a high barrier to entry 
for open-source players (who generally preferred simpler and more 
transparent technology).  Unfortunately, we were unable to drum up 
community interest among pegasus-list and open source CIM project 
leaders.   As we generally prefer secure XMLRPC ourselves (and are also 
looking forward towards message bus systems like QPid -- 
http://cwiki.apache.org/qpid/), there wasn't a lot of sense in 
continuing to invest in it without community interest from a few CIM 
experts that could help us out.   I should probably update the Cimbiote 
page to better address it's current status.  

As I recall, the method support did work fine ... though I forget how to 
use wbemcli myself.   There were some strange issues with it and the way 
it parsed arguments.   Most likely wbemcli is not reading the argument 
list correctly, and we did encounter a few bugs where calling some CIM 
functions though wbemcli didn't appear to work (using other providers 
too, not just with Cimbiote).

Maybe I can help you out though ... we used some of the sblim providers 
for reference when working on Cimbiote, and 
http://sblim.wiki.sourceforge.net/ might have a service provider.  I 
believe it did, though I do not remember exactly what it supported. 

Hope that helps out some.   If you have any interest in contributing to 
the project, you are definitely welcome to.

Thanks,

--Michael