Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

New version of Ambrosio

Ambrosio is almost ready for major deployment. A new version is available (0.3), and now you can subscribe the bots presence.

The roadmap is something like this:

  1. Finish Notice plugin: you drop small files in a specific directory, the local bot will pick them up and forward them to the JID's specified in the file - this allows for other scripts or applications in each one of your servers to send notifications;
  2. Better management of notifications and presence: don't send notifications to people that are away or disconnected.
  3. Multi-User chat support: its going to be nice to enter a room filled with your webservers and tell them all, restart apache, or having bots talking to one another like people, bloody harvest at IP_ADDRESS and have all the others block that IP via iptables
  4. Log watcher: probably just a gateway to a local swatch application?
  5. Start to think about a meta-bot: a bot controlling the other bots - he can receive notifications for disconnected users, and decide what to do with them:
    • forward part of the notification via SMS?
    • send a URL pointing to the note?
    • keep a log of unread notices?
  6. Each plugin could have variables that he was willing to supply to some one: uptime can have the load, df can have free_kb_partition. These variables can be watched (you get some notification if they change, or if they trigger some threshold), or even logged (sql or rrdtool).

I have more ideas, some totally crazy (like having a pam_bot that asks the admin of the machine if the person trying to logging can do so before allowing it :) ), others more useful.

Remember that the core of Ambrosio is likely to change in the near future. The plugins will most likely be compatible. But the core will change a lot!.