[Pulp-list] Consumer History

Todd B. Sanders tsanders at redhat.com
Fri Sep 24 19:21:15 UTC 2010


  On 09/24/2010 01:19 PM, Jason Dobies wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> There was a discussion yesterday in the chat room about whether or not a
> failed package install represents a consumer history event. This
> ultimately boiled down to the question of:
>
> Is consumer history the list of state changes to a consumer?
> or
> Is consumer history the list of actions taken against a consumer?
>
> It's a subtle but important distinction. The former excludes failed
> package installations; ultimately nothing has changed on the consumer
> therefore no history event is logged. The latter is meant to be a log of
> everything that was done to a specific consumer in a query-able fashion
> (that's important and will come up later).
>
> It ultimately comes down to what this will be used for. I envision it as
> a way for an admin to know everything that pulp has done to/with/on a
> consumer, including anything that failed. For instance, consider the
> following series of events:
>
> - - Admin attempts to install package A on consumer X.
> - - Installation fails because of a missing dependency (newer version,
> etc.).
> - - Admin binds repo M to consumer X.
> - - Admin attempts again to install package A on consumer X.
>
> I think tracking all of those events in one location is important. This
> provides context for why repo M was bound to the consumer; it was a
> result of the failure and caused the following package install to
> succeed. A failed package install is arguably more interesting to an
> admin than a successful one, since it may represent something wrong on
> the box (incorrect assumptions about what's on it, something nasty was
> done to the box outside of pulp, solar flares are affecting the data
> center, etc).
>
> One argument was made that failed package installs should only be logged
> in the audit log rather than in consumer history. After sleeping on it,
> I disagree with this. One reason is that it splits the full picture of
> the consumer actions into two places, requiring a manual correlation
> between them to determine the sequence of events. I'm not sure the audit
> subsystem can be queried through the API, which would mean not only two
> places, but two different mechanisms (API and direct DB access/log file
> parsing).
>
> Another is that, to me, auditing is a log of "things done by people to
> or using pulp". That's a much more generic concept than "things done to
> a consumer". The notion of what happens to a consumer is an important
> one and keeping all of it as a first class concept with flexible queries
> is going to make it easier for an admin to get whatever view is wanted
> with respect to that consumer.
>
> Thoughts?
>
> - -- 
> Jason Dobies
> RHCE# 805008743336126
> Freenode: jdob
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v2.0.14 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Fedora - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
>
> iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJMnN22AAoJEOMmcTqOSQHCCcYH/1SgTMAPYFwSUW9M3mWnW3kM
> Kr56fyc7ky/B5bj6A3bep61iD+5tWZKhGgKM85jSQDLCOER3y1LmH9rfLCegiTXv
> y/4JuLlNZIc+INlaXhZ6bz9WwyuNRFeQ3Q8gwyRKnMYyAakyiOPIccHYpYth/BMf
> VRkZtwGsM5AjdD6P4qFrDwEdxVkh/fWCqAU3Dp/ppLhAxsiCRqQw1fo/KMNcrEQ/
> r2YJPcvGWH4Q8TROrfKvvA31oiNK0X4ujNIZS2qiJ5M2p26AEPWrKplK7oOTwIsJ
> rchkv8hyLs+6Xk+5evJ7g+f6mx9KuQJDeOOCobmkPXhuE/EXjftW5GSA4OyCNOM=
> =JIc/
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
> _______________________________________________
> Pulp-list mailing list
> Pulp-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/pulp-list
Consumer History is the actions taken against a consumer (i.e. system) 
and their result (positive or *negative*).  Definitely includes the 
failure cases.

For me, Consumer History tells me the "what" for a given system (i.e. 
scheduled a package install and it failed).   If I need to know the 
"who" (i.e. user: jdob scheduled the package install on 9/22/2010 @ 
4:45pm), I'll check out the audit log.

-Todd





More information about the Pulp-list mailing list