Hardware Database (WAS Re: RH recommends using Windows? plus a Question!)

[Warren Togami]

On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 21:13, Maxwell Kanat-Alexander wrote:
> 
> 	Languages
> 	---------
> 
> 	GUI: PyGTK. It's clearly the Red Hat standard for GUI projects.
> 
> 	Backend: SQL and Python. Some C if required for interfacing with Open
> Source Projects we use.
> 
> 	Web Interface: PHP or Python. Once again, this might also depend
> somewhat on the other projects we integrate.
> 

This is also a clear case for XMLRPC-like communication between client
and server.


> 	Other Implementation Notes
> 	--------------------------
> 
> 	We have a lot of tools that can get data for us:
> 
> 	lspci, dmidecode, dmesg
> 
> 	What I _don't_ really think would be fun would be parsing the text
> output of those programs. MKJ thought it would be ideal if dmidecode
> could give us XML. Anybody know if there's a tool that already does
> this, or something we could start with? hwbrowser seems to make sense of
> that data somehow -- is there a way to get data out of it? Who's the
> maintainer of hwbrowser?

lspci and some other data can be communicated easily parsed from the
numeric form:

[root at laptop root]# lspci -n
00:00.0 Class 0600: 1106:0305 (rev 03)
00:01.0 Class 0604: 1106:8305
00:07.0 Class 0601: 1106:0686 (rev 40)
00:07.1 Class 0101: 1106:0571 (rev 06)
00:07.2 Class 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 1a)
00:07.3 Class 0c03: 1106:3038 (rev 1a)
00:07.4 Class 0601: 1106:3057 (rev 40)
00:07.5 Class 0401: 1106:3058 (rev 50)
00:07.6 Class 0780: 1106:3068 (rev 30)
00:0a.0 Class 0607: 104c:ac51
00:0a.1 Class 0607: 104c:ac51
00:0e.0 Class 0c00: 104c:8020
00:10.0 Class 0200: 10ec:8139 (rev 10)
01:00.0 Class 0300: 1002:4c4d (rev 64)

Ultimately all of this and other data should be converted into XML and
communicated over the Internet.  The pygtk applications on the client
side displays human readable information based upon a lookup table from
this data.  That particular part isn't the challenge.


> 
> 	It would be a good idea to have people submit data and have a "No
> Problems Reported" status.
> 
> 	The program would probably be a small applet that exists in the tray
> until run. After that, it should disappear forever. The alternative is
> an icon on the user's desktop saying "submit your hardware information"
> or something like that.

I hope this applet would not be within the default Gnome/KDE profile,
because then it would pop up on the user desktop of all users at least
once.  This is not ideal for massive multi-user systems like LTSP.

I believe this may be ideal for firstboot, and also choosable from the
System menu.  Perhaps there are better ideas...

Warren