Hi All,
It has turned out that the agent is a little bit difficult to work with, trying to extract data using only shell scripting is a bit of a pain.
It's difficult for us to do any form of authentication or encryption, and parsing of the returned data can be a little haphazard because we rely on correct formatting.
I've been thinking of alternative designs, possibly using PHP (Perl or Python would probably be better, but they're not viable languages for us) and either an embedded web server or hanging off inetd as it currently does.
This would allow us to do encryption, to require some form of authentication and to pass around easier to parse JSON or serialize()'d arrays
Personally, I almost always install a PHP CLI interpreter on my servers because I do 'shell' scripting in PHP, but what do the rest of you think? Would you be willing to install php-cli on your servers if you got the ability to do encrypted/authenticated/compressed agent connections?
What about if we allowed you to funnel SNMP queries via the agent? (only for UNIX hosts, obviously)
adam.