# A server that will serve http page created from data collec **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [September 19, 2006, 2:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-server-that-will-serve-http-page-created-from-data-collec/69223 "2006-09-19T14:46:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 2:46pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-server-that-will-serve-http-page-created-from-data-collec/69223/1 "2006-09-19T14:46:46Z")
Dear Group, I am planning to develop an application in WINDOWS OS using ruby. The front end of the application will be an web browser. It is actually an NETWORK MONITORING SYSTEM comprising of about 80 UNIX machine. in each of the machine every five minutes a text file is generated which gives the exception report of call failures of a TELECOM subscribers divided into various categories like DIAL CODE,VOICE CALL,DATA CALL etc . The whole idea is to coallate these files from 80 machines and represent them in web browser in tabular fashion in about 20 user PCs. After some home work … i have encapsulated following thoughts 1\> I need a server application that will run in each users’ PC which will be reponsible for a\> Collecting the 80 files … for this I think the server will need to use “rsh” service of WINDOWS. b\> Parse through these files and compare with the previous 5minutes’ data to see if there is any addition or deletion of failure case and create/append/modify the html file accordingly to serve 2\>The front end or the client application will be the standard web browser. Here the users will point their browser to the “localhost” to the appropiate location and the server will serve the file which will update every 5 minutes. I hope i could clearly state what I am trying to acheive. With this background . I would share the confusions that i have from implementation perspective. 1\> With The standard WEBBRICK/MONGREL servers … will I be able to do the rsh stuff? 2\> What do you recommend to for data management … The data that flows in every 5 minute will be small chunks like max 50 lines … should i use YAML or MYSQL ? 3\> Doing “rsh” will require system calls and that means threading will be of not much help. Instead I need to fork subprocesses … but in WINDOWS env … can it be done? Thanks Rajib ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 3:10pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-server-that-will-serve-http-page-created-from-data-collec/69223/2 "2006-09-19T15:10:49Z")
On 9/19/06, removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > It is actually an NETWORK MONITORING SYSTEM comprising of about 80 UNIX > machine. > in each of the machine every five minutes a text file is generated > which gives the exception report of call failures of a TELECOM > subscribers divided into various categories like DIAL CODE,VOICE > CALL,DATA CALL etc . > > The whole idea is to coallate these files from 80 machines and > represent them in web browser in tabular fashion in about 20 user PCs. The obvious first thought is to use DRb. Another possibility is: Build a web server (use Rails if you like) on a Unix machine that can access the 80 managed Unix machines via ssh. Have the server pull the 80 text files from the managed machines every five minutes via a cron script. You have no rsh, no Windows problems, only an ssh public key (that of the server) installed on each of the 80 machines. If you’re concerned about race conditions on the managed servers, have them rsync their files to the central server. (The downside is that you now need to install (and manage) 80 public keys on the server- not too bad.) Run your collation script on the server- the data format doesn’t matter very much but I would consider XML. Replicate the central server for redundancy. On the 20 Windows clients, you run nothing but a browser to the Rails app. A message-queueing solution would have made this even easier. ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 3:36pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-server-that-will-serve-http-page-created-from-data-collec/69223/3 "2006-09-19T15:36:52Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: > which gives the exception report of call failures of a TELECOM > a\> Collecting the 80 files … for this I think the server will > > use YAML or MYSQL ? This looks like a good candidate for Rails to me. The Model would be the database of systems to be monitored and the status values you want to retain from them. The View is of course the browser page. And the Controller is whatever actions your users want to be able to take. The questions: 1. Since you’re planning to do this on Windows, you could start with Instant Rails. That will give you Mongrel, weBRICK and Apache for web servers. The “rsh stuff” is outside of the web server. It happens on different TCP ports and will be executed outside the web server. By the way, there are security issues with “rsh”. You’ll want to use something more secure. You could use “ssh”, like most of the Internet-based Subversion and CVS repositories do. 1. There are really two options for data management that make sense to me. If you start with Instant Rails, you’ll have MySQL already, so you might as well use it. But the other option is a little more “interesting”, though outside the typical Rails (but not Ruby) realm. There’s an open-source tool called “RRDTool” that is designed to be a back end for exactly this type of application! There is a Ruby interface to it but as far as I know nobody has interfaced it to Rails. It does have some packages available for exporting an RRD (Round Robin Database) to conventional databases, so you could use RRDTool for your monitoring data collection and management functionality and Rails for the analysis and presentation. 1. Windows Ruby and Windows Ruby on Rails are both capable of doing this. However, if you use RRDTool, that will take care of the background work for you. ---
**Author:** ![unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/u/4bbf92/32.png) [@unknown](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/unknown)\ **Post date:** [September 19, 2006, 9:30pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/a-server-that-will-serve-http-page-created-from-data-collec/69223/4 "2006-09-19T21:30:59Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: / … > I hope i could clearly state what I am trying to acheive. So, you want each of 20 user machines to individually collect stats from 80 computers and generate a Web page summarizing the results. Yes? Why don’t you have one machine collect the stats every five minutes and serve the Web page to the others in some secure way? This would prevent a lot of redundant net traffic. If you used SSH, you could deliver the Web page without an HTTP server to any calling PC with the appropriate credentials. No Web server, one host machine, very secure. Simple. If the Web page turned out to be local, you could still do without the Web server. Since the page is local to the client machine, you could simply provide a file URL instead of a HTTP URL. Much simpler. If the page is accessed via SSH, same thing – no Web server required. And, as someone else has pointed out, rsh is a bad idea.