Marionette Collective version 0.4.8

I just released version 0.4.8 of mcollective. It’s a small maintenance release fixing a few bugs and adding a few features. I wasn’t planning on another 0.4.x release before the big 1.0.0 but want to keep 1.0.0 close as possible to something that’s been out there for a while.

The only major feature it introduces is custom reports of your infrastructure.

It supports two types of scriptlet for building reports. The first is a little DSL that uses printf style format strings:

inventory do
    format "%s:\t\t%s\t\t%s"
 
    fields { [ identity, facts["serialnumber"], facts["productname"] ] }
end

Which does something like this:

$ mc-inventory --script hardware.mc
web1:           KKxxx1H         IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20 -[8832M1X]-
rep1:           KKxxx5Z         IBM eServer BladeCenter HS20 -[8832M1X]-
db4:            KDxxxZY         IBM System x3655 -[794334G]-
man2:           KDxxxR0         eserver xSeries 336 -[88372CY]-
db2:            KDxxxGD         IBM System x3655 -[79855AG]-

The other – perhaps more ugly – is using a Perl like format method. To use this you need the formatr gem installed, and a report might look like this:

formatted_inventory do
    page_length 20
 
    page_heading <<TOP
 
            Node Report @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
                        time
 
Hostname:         Customer:     Distribution:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
TOP
 
    page_body <<BODY
 
@<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< @<<<<<<<<<<<< @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
identity,    facts["customer"], facts["lsbdistdescription"]
                                @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
                                facts["processor0"]
BODY
end

And the resulting report is something like this:

$ mc-inventory --script hardware.mc
            Node Report Fri Aug 20 21:49:39 +0100
 
Hostname:         Customer:     Distribution:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
web1              rip           CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
                                Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           L5420  
 
web2              xxxxxxx       CentOS release 5.5 (Final)
                                Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU           X3430

The report will be paged 20 nodes per page. The result is very pleasing even if the report format is a bit grim, but it would be much worse to write yet another reporting DSL!

See the full release notes for details on bug fixes and other features.

Marionette Collective version 0.4.8

Licence