My little SNMP query program that I wrote about in my last post is running. It has a few issues, but I think that they are actually bugs in the OS on the devices that I'm querying (
Motorola Canopy.) Suffice to say, the management interface on Canopy devices can be touchy. I'm going to have to record which devices failed to respond and query them one at a time after the AP has a chance to settle down (my shotgun query approach can't be helping either.)
On the plus side, all this practice is helping to improve my design and coding abilities in a way that
one or two homework assignments per week could not.
On the down/up side, Motorola is supposed to be coming out with a
package that will do what I'm doing and more, which will be nice. I hope that it lives up to their marketing hype.
The down side is that my program will no longer be needed.
The up side is that we can manage more with less right now, instead of having to go spend three months writing a broadband CPE management system.
I have a
Python+
SQLite app that gathers monitoring data from a number of
network devices. My app is run on a tight update cycle, so it must finish quickly. It was obvious that I had a problem when database activity took up more time than network scanning. That and my little program should not cause disk thrashing. Ouch! I now have a nice object lesson on why not to run a database commit after every insert.
Doing one commit at the end of processing, instead of one after every insert cut runtime in half. I didn't think that the difference would be
that big.
This is one of those things where I knew the right way to do it and did it the wrong way at first. Doing that goes away with experience, right?
Now I just need to find a way to do fast thread-safe inserts. I can't use
ZODB because of performance constraints, although
this post did convince me to take a look at it.
The Google Bubble
I can't help but wonder what will cause the
Google stock bubble to burst.
Google has shown that they can consistently make nifty products appear, but they do not seem to have any method to their madness.
I like the fact that they deliver neat products from all over the place, but I would think that the lack of consistency would worry investors.
The only way that I can group Google's services together is by thinking of them as providing higher-level building blocks for the Internet.
Froogle and
Google Maps are some good examples.
I'm a bit curious about their plans for
Google Sets. They could do some really neat stuff if Sets works across all of Google's services.