I am generating a monitoring system that needs to look at specific
processes on a number of systems. What I would like to have is to make
the icons representing the systems and processes have attached menus
so that I can call up the menu by double clicking with the left mouse
button. I figure that the attribute "post-menu" can be read on a
double click and its value would name the menu.
Would this be a major problem? Should I just create additional top
level menus (I am running out of space on the top menu bar which is
why I want icon based menu) to do this monitoring?
Also it would be nice if there was a way to lock the tkined
graph. This way inadvertant keypresses etc wound't screw up a
carefully laid out map. It would be a monitor-only mode. Simply hiding
the toolbox stills leaves the last selected tool available. I think
select should be the only enabled, and button2 move should be disabled
along with the icon, edit, and structure menus. The double-click menu
could be provided by the tkined file provider if needed.
Is there any way to automatically set various attributes when adding
new nodes? Some sort of dialog that could be set oncebefore creating
nodes. It sure beats having to do all of the attribute creation by
hand, and I still don't feel comfortable pulling emacs up on a .tki
file 8-).
Also different link designators/types, e.g. dashed lines, dashed and
dotted etc. would be useful. I have serial connections from some hosts
going into a terminal server that need to be represented on a black
and white screen, and in printouts. Sadly changing the color of the
links just doesn't quite do it, but a different link pattern would do
nicely. This could also be used for networks as well, since telling
line widths apart can be somewhat tricky.
Would it be possible to allow groups within groups? By this I mean a
strict heirarchy. If group a is within group b, then all elements of
group a are in group b. There are no elements of group a that wouldn;t
be in group b. The app I am looking at has a flag icon (node) for each
process to be monitored. I would like to group all of these processes
with the host that they are running on, and use the group icon in
collapsed mode to represent the host and its processes. (Actually I
added the sparccenter 2000 bitmap to the group bitmap list so I could
get a reasonable bitmap for the host/group.) I would like this for
heirarchies within the network.
What would also be nice is to allow the references to be linked into
maps as nodes. Also all of the group bitmaps should be usable as
bitmaps for references. This way I could create a map of groups and
pull up new tkined maps for the group expansions. One major problem I
have is that group expansions always take up more room than the group
icon, and when expanded invariably collide with other things drawn on
the map. Using the refernces and allowing them to be linked is an easy
way of representing groups that pop up new tkined screens with their
own monitoring tools. I see no reason the "expanding groups" paradigm
couldn't be used on a "reference group" as well. Expansions on groups
would have to be defined a bit differently depending on whether the
group is a real group, or a reference, but that should be easy enough.
Also is it possible to traverse the host to group mapping so that the
group icons could also be flashed when a host inside the group is
flashing/changing color? Setting the propigate attribute on the group
icon/border could be the flag that allows this. Obviously this
wouldn't work with "reference groups", or would it? Is there some way
for the new tkined process to know what the original reference and
interpreter was so that it could flash that node?
Also has anybody figured out a way to set thresholds on individual
components of rstat bar graphs? I would really like a notification
when swapin/swapout goes above 0, but setting thresholds trigers when
any value goes above 0.
Well I guess that's enough for now, I'm tired 8-).
-- John
John Rouillard
Senior Systems Administrator IDD Information Services
rouilj@dstar.iddis.com Waltham, MA (617) 890-1576 x103
Senior Systems Consultant (SERL Project) University of Massachusetts at Boston
rouilj@cs.umb.edu (preferred) Boston, MA, (617) 287-6480
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My employers don't acknowledge my existence much less my opinions.