[Osiris-devel]status.h: what exactly is start_time?

[Aaron Racine]

Is start_time meant to be the time that osirisd started, or is it
supposed to be the time that a scan started, or something else?  I'm
guessing it's daemon uptime (as uptime is mentioned in the draft 2.0
documentation on the web site).

If that is an accurate guess, then do you all see value in also having
the local daemons keep track of something like
current_status_start_time, which would basically be updated every time
the status changes?  I could see several benefits of having this
functionality:

 1) This would allow us to answer the question, "how long have you
    been idle/scanning/receiving a config," which in turn...

 2) Allows for external auditing of any scheduling functionality we
    might implement.  And when I say external, I mean external to the
    scheduling functions, not necessarily osiris.

    For example, a management station could be told to run a scan on
    host H once a day, and at the same time, the daemon on H could be
    queried once a day during a known idle time.  If it ever reports
    status=idle and (current_time - current_status_start_time > 24
    hours), you'd know something was wrong.

 3) I could definitely see allowing for multiple/redundant management
    hosts, so relying on the mangement host to keep track of when a
    scan started might not be the best approach, considering that the
    second management host might need (but would not have) that
    information.

    For example, if the primary management host starts a scan
    and then crashes, it would be nice for the secondary management
    host to be able to query all the daemons to figure out how long
    they've been scanning.  I suppose we could configure the
    management hosts to talk to each other so they could share this
    information between themselves, but that seems unnecessary (and
    the required NxN management connections wouldn't scale).

Thoughts?

Aaron