Take control using Lithium Touch
Lithium Touch is great.
When out of the office, it is a valuable information to see what's
not working.
But it would be much greater if it also had the ability to control
devices instead of just viewing their states.
I think it would be a great idea if Lithium Touch had the
ability to start and stop a service.
And I think it would be great if Lithium Touch also had the ability
to reboot a server.
Basically, if LOM is configured for a server, Lithium Touch
could send a command to the server, thus telling the lithium server
to issue a ipmitool command using the information configured for
that server to turn the server off and then back on again.
And using the information for server admin, it could easily start
and stop services on a server.
In the future, you could maybe even add custom scripts to be
executed on a machine using Lithium Touch
For example: Lithium tells me that there is a problem with my mail server. I could then react using lithium touch to restart the mail service. If that does not help or the machine hangs, I could then reboot it using the LOM of the server.
What do you think about my idea?
Support Staff 2 Posted by James Wilson on 03 Mar, 2010 07:26 AM
Hi Kurt,
It's a neat idea, but it steps beyond the boundaries of where Lithium stops and other tools take over.
Our manifesto for Lithium is to create the best monitoring tool for people who use Mac OS X. But there's a fine line between monitoring and management. Management and control -- i.e, performing tasks such as rebooting, etc -- could open up a world of new things that Lithium could do. However implementing, supporting and maintaining these features would take away from our core focus of monitoring.
To a degree, you can implement this sort of functionality yourself by leveraging the Actions feature of Lithium with custom Action scripts. But we always strongly advise extreme caution when scripting things like server or process reboots.
Thanks for the feedback, please keep it coming!
Cheers