About Hotwire
Hotwire originally started out on sourceforge.net under the name kickme. The sourceforge page is once again maintained and can be found here...
The freshmeat page can be found here...
The 4 Components of the Hotwire Suite
The Hotwire project is made up of a set of integrated tools for managing a medium-size to an enterprise-sized network environment. The suite is made up of 4 components, the first two are required, and the latter two are optional, but highly recommended.
1. Hotwire Inventory System ®
This is the core component of the suite. It accounts for servers (physical, blades, virtuals), operating systems, hardware, peripherals, data centers, etc. Alone, this component is non-dynamic and completely controlled by the administrators of Hotwire. Coupled with the Funcwire components however, it can be turned into something more (keep reading!).
2. Hotwire Rapid-Build & Deploy System ®
This component of Hotwire allows for automated of servers; The tasks required to carry out an automated build, such as configuration of tftp, pxe, dhcp, autofs, and the auto-build script itself of course, are all handled by Hotwire. For a list of operating systems currently supported.
Currently supported platforms are SUSE Linux (SLES), via AutoYaST, Red Hat Linux (RHEL), via Kickstart, and Debian, via Preseed. This component also extends the functionality of these technologies and allows for more control.
Servers are placed into the building state, and the generated auto-build scripts can be previewed via the web interface. Once the build is kicked off, the state of the server is automatically changed to an intermediate state BUILDING, and once complete, to active.
3. Hotwire LiveInventory Server ® (AKA Funcwire-Overlord)
This component, like the first two, is installed on the Hotwire server, and is used to control the Hotwire LiveInventory Clients ®.
The LiveInventory System ® is an optional install that will allow the inventory to communicate will all clients in its database, and even discover new ones in the bounds of the configured networks. It ensures that the data in the inventory is consistent with the configuration (Operating System, Hardware, Networking, Applications, etc) of the servers themselves.
4. Hotwire LiveInventory Client ® (AKA Funcwire-Minion)
This is the only component that needs to (optionally) be installed on the servers that are desired to take part in the LiveInventory? ® process. The data is taken from the server via python-dmidecode and lsb-utils, and this is compared to that which exists in the inventory. Discrepancies are reported, and the administrator can choose to allow the changes to be made to the inventory, or otherwise.
Optionally, servers that support lights-out modules can be used instead of the hotwire Inventory client, however this will not reveal as much detail as the client would. Supported remote-access technologies are HP iLO, and IBM ASM.
The Hotwire Crew
- Nima Talebi
- Project leader
- Developer
- Keith Amiscaray
- Co-author, co-designer and co-developer of the predecessor project, kickme
- Joel Heenan
- Developer
- Introduced Func, Certmaster, cx_Oracle, and SQLAlchemy into the project.
- Huge help in the designing and implementation of the LiveInventory system.
- Developed the SuSE AutoYaST support.
- Developer
- Stephanie Miller
- Developer
- Jo Tang
- Documentation
- Testing of RBD and UI.
- Stephen Darragh
- Background brains
- Developer
- Patrick Huynh
- Database design, and Oracle-specifics
And Many Thanks To
- Frank Glooberhoppen
