FAQ (Frequenly Asked Questions)
Introduction
What is Hotwire?
The Hotwire Suite, in a nutshell, is an Open-Source Enterprise Inventory System, and a Rapid Build & Deploy System.
A modules for a Procurement System is also under development at the moment but largely unrelated to the main purpose of Hotwire, and experimental.
What is Kickme?
Hotwire was originally developed on sourceforge under the original name Kickme, since being rewritten in symfony it has been renamed to Hotwire.
Who is the target Hotwire Audience
For medium to large enterprise businesses. Smaller businesses can also use this product but given the infrequency of builds, the overhead may be not be worth while. Specifically, hotwire is a tool written for Unix System Administrators, by Unix System Administrators, however once set up, other technical staff can use it for rolling out builds, and anyone can use it as an inventory system.
Kickme is available here for those interested to see where Hotwire started.
Installation
What Operating Systems can Hotwire be installed on?
So far, it has been tested on the following distributions, however there is no reason why it should not be possible to install in on any Linux playform.
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) rpm package
- Debian dpkg package
Supported Software/Hardware
What are the supported Target Operating Systems?
The Rapid Build & Deploy (RBD) System support for custom builds for the following platforms.
- RHEL Kickstart
- SuSE AutoYaST
- Debian Preseed
See the Support Matrix for details.
What are the supported Database backends?
- Hotwire supports the following databases...
- Oracle 10g (oracle)
- PostgreSQL (pgsql)
- The support for the following databases are yet to be implemented, however this is a trivial task as Hotwire abstracts the database using ORM (object-relational mapping).
- MySQL (mysql)
- MySQLi (mysqli)
- Microsoft SQL (mssql)
- SQLite (sqlite)
Inventory
How do I manage data degradation (aging)?
Over time, in a large network, it is almost guaranteed that the data will age and go out-of-sync with the actual machines and the actual network, etc. Hotwire can resolve this problem if you opt to install the Funcwire LiveInventory client on the managed servers.
- An optional lightweight daemon (funcwire-minion) can run on the managed hosts, accepting connections from the Hotwire server. The server can then check all hosts against the data in the inventory, and report/alert on the discrepancies.
- There is also support for some remote-access technologies such as HP iLO and IBM ASM.
Web Interface
Command-Line Interface (CLI)
Do I have to use a Web Browser to talk to the Inventory?
Command-line utilities have been provided which allow you to query the database from a terminal, aimed at catering for the needs of system administrators and technical managers. The current answer is No, and that's because the commandline utilities are still under development.
The long-term answer is Yes - all actions that are available via the web interface will be available from commandline, which includes both querying the database, and making modifications to it.
Rapid-Build & Deploy (RBD)
What Hardware has Hotwire RBD been tested with?
Hotwire has built and manages the following platforms...
- HP Proliant DL380, DL385, DL580, and DL585.
- IBM 3850
- VMware
- KVM
See the Support Matrix for details.
You can also visit the dedicated RBD F.A.Q pages if you're after specific details...
Where can I find the Kickstart script on the built machines?
/root/anaconda-ks.cfg
