Functions

After logging in, the main window will show up, which is subdivided into four panels.

The control panel

In the upper left is the control panel that provides the following four functions:

Also, the current status of the server (running/stopped/unknown) will be indicated. This information is gained by reading the servers PID from the pid file and probing for the existence of the process. The status line doubles as a link to the HTML status page written by the server.

The Clients panel

In the Clients panel, Beltane shows the list of currently recognized clients. Left in the title bar, you will find the Add function to add a new client entry.

The status of any client is indicated by a coloured box to the left of the client name (purple = Alert, red = Critical, orange = Error, yellow = Warning, green = Info, white = None). This status corresponds to the most severe new message for the corresponding client.

Right click on a client name will bring up a menu with the following items:

The Client database

Beltane requires an up-to-date database of installed clients, and allows you to interactively edit this database, if needed. This database is a flat file in XML format, named yulerc.install.db, and located in the profiles/ subdirectory of the yule data directory. For each client, this file has the following entries:

If you are using the deploy.sh command delivered with samhain in order to deploy clients to remote hosts, this file will already exist, as deploy.sh uses it to log the performed installations. Otherwise, you will need to edit/create the list of installed clients manually.

If the file does not exist on startup, Beltane will create a dummy file. You need to create then a valid entry, before you can delete the DUMMY entry.

WarningWarning
 

Beltane will need the the FQDN of clients in the client database (or the IP number, if clients are known to yule by IP number only). In particular, Beltane will not function properly if you have only the hostname in the client database, and yule is configured to strip the domain.

The Messages panel

The Messages panel displays new messages, i.e. messages not yet acknowledged by the user. For each message, a status icon, the database index, severity, hostname, the message text, and (if applicable) the file path is shown. Each message can be selected with a select box to the left.

Clicking on the database index will display all details of the respective message. Clicking on the host name will alter the message panel to show messages for that host only (use All Clients in the upper right to reset). In addition, the following functions are provided