[Orca-users] are old percol-* (orcallator) files necessary?

[Steve Gilbert]

I have two questions today...first, the (hopefully) easy one:

Is it necessary to keep old orcallator output files (ie: the percol-*
files, not the rrd files) around?  I've been running orcallator
on several systems for several months now, and those old percol-*.gz
files are really starting to pile up.  When is it okay to blow them
away?  After Orca runs and updates the rrd files?

And now for the tougher one...as I mentioned earlier, I'm working
on using Perl and SNMP to create my own orcallator-ish program to
monitor a cluster of Linux machines.  I've got one problem left to
figure out, and them I am done.  This one also pertains to the percol
files.  Orcallator runs constantly and rotates the percol-* file each
day.  My code (for now, anyway) is going to be run out of cron every
5 minutes to poll the target machines and write a new line to the
file (it generates an average of all the stats returned to it).  The
only thing I have left to do is devise a mechanism to rotate the
percol-* files and make sure my "orcallator" is looking at the proper
file each day.  I'd like to keep this as simple as possible.  Ideally,
I'd just like to fire off a shell script at midnight to rotate the
file and keep that job independent of my "orcallator."

So I guess what I need to know is if those percol-* files need to be
saved for any reason and if they need to follow the "percol-date" naming
scheme.  In my perfect world, I would just have one file named "percol"
that "orcallator" looks at all the time which gets rotated daily.  Is
this possible simply by modifying the find_files line in Orca's .cfg
file?  Am I just asking for a lot of trouble with this model?  I can
certainly use Perl to look for a file with the date as part of the
filename, but if I could avoid that, it would be really great.  My
"percol" file that I'm generating does contain both the timestamp
returned from time() and the localtime (00:00:00) field.

Thanks so much for any help.  If anyone is interested in checking out
what I've done, I'll be glad to pass it along once it's completed.

Steve Gilbert
gilbert at cs.utk.edu

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