[Asterisk-Users] res_motv: Request for Comment

[Andy Powell]

>Just curious, but why does it strike you as such a bad idea?  Especially if
>it was disabled by default.  I can understand you not wanting your system
>security or your personal privacy compromised, but I think it would be
>great to have it in place for:
>
>A) Manual activation for those who want automated updates.
>B) CLI execution for occasional comparison to the current set.

As a completely seperate application I'd probably not object (like zttool), I just don't think that this should be any part of *. Bearing in mind the number of outages that occur, the number of potential failures when connecting via the net. It's not just a privacy issue it's a functionality issue... if I manage 20 servers (same version)  I don't need all 20 of them to say "what are the fixes for this" .. I just want 1, and I want to do it manually... the other thing is that there isn't an easy way to check what version you are running, after updating from cvs the version doesn't always change (annoying at the best of times)...

...but the core of my 'problem' is software that calls home. 


>Perhaps it should be possible to flag the request with a token indicating
>that you don't want to be part of the "survey", and you don't want your
>IP/host information stored.  A --anon option, if you will.

I would expect the --anon option to be the default, any communication to be encrypted, and the db secure... 


>> I can only wait until we see M$ like activation implemented... oh the
>> joy...
>
>I am going to guess that you're joking.  I just don't see that happening.
>Mark and the team at Digium seem dedicated to open source and to the
>Asterisk community.  His asking for comments on this idea is a pretty good
>indicator of his concern for the community's opinions.

I was being facecious



>> It would be much better just to have the information present on either
>the
>> Digium site or some other location. I see little point in wasting your
>> valuable time doing something like this when there are so many
>>outstanding issues and feature requests that could offer more.

>Perhaps Mark's time could be spent on other things, but I would still like
>to see Digium offer this option -- perhaps one of the other developers
>could head up the effort?

True, but just take a look at the bug tracker, feature requests are getting rejected because "we don't have time, we're too busy fixing bugs" 


>Just putting the current version information up on a web page is nice, but
>it doesn't allow me to automatically query the system and discover known
>issues and possible solutions.  I think that, for service providers that
>could very well be a critical next step.  Several of my clients made the
>decision to go with RedHat based on their update service (for which they
>gladly paid).


I was actually thinking more along the lines of enter your version details on a web form and you get the updates and fixes info based on that, it's then only 2 minutes coding away for a simple perl (or other) app to automagically retrieve the info if you require. This makes it purely voluntary and you have to actively request the call home feature, saving us from programmer coding errors which could accidentally enable it by default during bug fixes etc. 



Andy