PHAT 0.0.1 review

PHAT is a browser-based network management solution with a heavy lean toward switches, routers, and other traffic handlers which can

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Steve Elgersma

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PHAT is a browser-based network management solution with a heavy lean toward switches, routers, and other traffic handlers which can be used to control either a single node, subnet, or vlan.

As you can probably see if you're reading this, PHAT is not the world's most useful tool... yet. The reason I released this code in the first place was because I found myself in a vicious cycle: I didn't want to release the code until it was a little cleaner, a little more useful, and less dependent on site-specific stuff (currently, PHAT is quite reliant on NIS for example). However, I really haven't had all the time in the world to devote to coding (I'm also a sys/network admin), so getting PHAT to this 'presentable' state has been tough (obviously, as I still don't consider it very presentable). I realized the only way to be useful was if I just released it for better or worse, and let people have at it.

Right now, the only things PHAT can really do depend on NIS, and MySQL. However, the NIS stuff should go away soon, and it's not very hard to understand what's happening. Anyone with a decent level of networking and PHP expertise should be able to rip out the NIS stuff and replace it, or abstract the stuff altogether. The MySQL stuff will go away too, but not tomorrow or next week. As more people get involved who have more experience in dealing with ADODB or the PEAR DB stuff we'll move toward one of those.

In addition to reading this file, you really should read the source files as well, as I have a tendency to write really verbose stuff in there.
So, in a nutshell, I picked the release name "pseudocode" because that's exactly what PHAT currently is. It's a proof of concept. Everything has been done in a very brute force manner and has been tested just enough that there's some evidence that this stuff can work and I can demo it for a few interested local parties :)

At this stage in the game, ideas reign supreme. The only thing that rules over talking about ideas is coding prototypes for them.

What's New in This Release:
PHP 4.x: As far as I know, any 4.x version works. I always use the latest version of PHP, and the version I used initially was 4.1x, I don't exactly remember which one.

Apache: This has only ever been tested on Apache. UNIX/Linux: PHAT, at this stage, still makes a couple of systemcalls that are *nix specific. It's been tested on Linux and
Solaris. This dependency should eventually go away.

NIS: This dependency really has to go away. Abstracting the things PHAT uses NIS for right now is the first order of business.

MySQL: I want to use the PEAR or ADODB stuff, but haven't been overjoyed with either one. I don't want to have PHAT be dependent on any one database.