[Cu-wireless] Information System

[David Young]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 04:13:14PM -0600, Stephane Alnet wrote:
> >>If you go through the archives of the list you'll see that last fall 
> >>we
> >>discussed a way to forward logs back to a central server using SMTP.
> >>That could be used to provide historical network adjacency information
> >>(how many times did a link flap, etc.) without the requirement for
> >>additional processes on the routers.
> >
> >At the risk of asking a dumb question, would that mean that the nodes
> >would have to have SMTP services running?
> 
> No, an SMTP client would be sufficient. Having a queueing mechanism of 
> some sorts (in case the SMTP server becomes inaccessible) would be 
> helpful; but this doesn't have to be a full-blown MTA. (*)

FWIW, the postfix MTA comes as several daemons and utilities, each
with a specialized role, including SMTP client & server roles. Maybe it
is possible to pare it down to just the bare minimum set of programs,
and then to "crunch" those together?

You need to balance size and functionality.  Keep in mind that in the near
long-term (apologies), we are going to target systems with smaller and
smaller RAM & Flash, so we are pretty jealous of our storage head-room. On
the other hand, paring things down takes time, and the logging feature
is something we're sorely missing right now.  I'm not so concerned that
it all fits in 100K or that it's finished tomorrow as much as that the
trade-offs are documented along the way.

> I guess somewhere the question boils down to "push" vs "pull", and I'm 
> advocating for "push". :)

Me, too. It would suck to make the server "pull" through a NAT. =)

Dave

-- 
David Young             OJC Technologies
dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933