(Shock, horror, two posts in one day!)

The title of my project is "Distributed Network/Host Monitoring Application". Basically, I’m going to be writing something that collects status data from a lot of client machines and displays it to the sysadmin. What I’m trying to do to set it apart from other systems is by decentralising the monitoring servers.

I hope to have a system where you can install, say, three monitoring servers, and however many clients. Servers would have addresses of other servers (not necessarily all, but enough so that there are redundant routes between each of them). You’d give each client a list of servers to report to; they’d randomly pick one to send status updates to. A status report would include a list of servers that it’s been seen by. When receiving a report from a client, each server would send each report to each other server that hasn’t seen it (adding itself to the list of servers that has). If any of the monitoring servers goes down, the rest should carry on regardless (exponential backoff when trying to connect to other servers and so on would be helpful).

It’s early days yet; my first major task is to actually design the damn system and how it’s actually going to fit together (with, hopefully, a development methodology not quite so ad-hoc as I’ve used in the past).

Recently I’ve been thinking about ease of use of interfaces. As you may know, I’ve a Flickr account where I post my photographs; I also have a deviantART account for the same purpose.

Generally, when I take pictures, I post any that are reasonably good to Flickr without even thinking about it. I can use the web form and upload five at a time, or I can mail them in; I have my own script for mailing them that I may post at some point.

Uploading to deviantART requires me to use the web form and upload one at a time, and go through a lot of rigmarole that’s not necessary with Flickr — for example, Flickr lets you set a default CC licence for your pictures; deviantART does allow you to specify one, but you must do it individually for each picture; it’s not possible to set a default.

I didn’t really consciously think about it; I just uploaded them to Flickr because it’s easy.

It’s also easy to do things with them; Flickr, like any good Web 2.0 site, has an API that I’ve hardly even begun to look at, but it means I can follow my friends’ activity from the comfort of my mail client, and any new photos get shown on my Facebook profile. deviantART has RSS feeds, but most of them are so well-hidden as to be completely useless.

Something to think about for my final-year project, or any other web stuff I happen to write in the future — multiple access methods for data, both incoming and outgoing.