Me on Stuff

Andrew Thompson informed the NZFUG list there is now a New Zealand FreeBSD wiki. It’s for *BSD users in New Zealand.

I’ve managed to get my front and back ends talking to each other. The front-end is written in Python. It loads a Glade file and uses that to generate the window to display.

To run it you need a copy of //depot/projects/soc2007/andrew-update/ from perforce. Run ‘make’ to build it. Next, from the backend directory, run ‘facund-be -c freebsd-config-control.conf’. This starts the backend. In a new terminal, from the frontend directory, run ‘python facund.py’. It will open a window with what will become a list of computers on the left with a connect and disconnect button under it. When the connect button is clicked it should attempt to connect to the back-end over the /tmp/facund unix socket and send a start message to the back-end. On disconnect it will send a stop message and wait for the back-end to do the same.

The rest of the communication is yet to be defined but I have a basic idea of the front-end sending a request something like <get value=”available_updates” id=”random_id”/>. The back-end then sends a <return id=”random_id” data=”none”/>. The return data may be changes to allow for non-string types, e.g. bool, int, array, etc.