language parallax

I’ve been doing some consulting lately that has had me revisiting a lot of old ground. We’re using cobbler and puppet for large portions of it. Nagios is the likely candidate for monitoring, with maybe some cacti thrown in for historical charting. It’s a little disappointing given all the work done at Excite and NOCpulse, which surpassed what can be done with these other tools.

While searching for more alternatives, a colleague noticed Spacewalk. It took me a while to realize what this was. Could it be all the NOCpulse code? One git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/spacewalk.git/ later, I was seeing a lot of familiar code.

In 2002 Red Hat acquired NOCpulse shortly after I left for UCLA for grad school. Looks like six years later they are open-sourcing all the code they acquired. There’s some discussion about telling a fuller story of this code, including a list of alumni contributors.

I’m anxious to see where it goes from here. Open source tools in this area are sorely lacking — is Spacewalk the answer? I’ll likely be posting a lot more about this in the future.