At work, we have a few hundred Linux servers, and with that amount -of hardware it is important to keep track of when the hardware support -contract expire for each server. We have a machine (and service) -register, which until recently did not contain much useful besides the -machine room location and contact information for the system owner for -each machine. To make it easier for us to track support contract -status, I've recently spent time on extending the machine register to -include information about when the support contract expire, and to tag -machines with expired contracts to make it easy to get a list of such -machines. I extended a perl script already being used to import -information about machines into the register, to also do some screen -scraping off the sites of Dell, HP and IBM (our majority of machines -are from these vendors), and automatically check the support status -for the relevant machines. This make the support status information -easily available and I hope it will make it easier for the computer -owner to know when to get new hardware or renew the support contract. -The result of this work documented that 27% of the machines in the -registry is without a support contract, and made it very easy to find -them. 27% might seem like a lot, but I see it more as the case of us -using machines a bit longer than the 3 years a normal support contract -last, to have test machines and a platform for less important -services. After all, the machines without a contract are working fine -at the moment and the lack of contract is only a problem if any of -them break down. When that happen, we can either fix it using spare -parts from other machines or move the service to another old -machine.
- -I believe the code for screen scraping the Dell site was originally -written by Trond Hasle Amundsen, and later adjusted by me and Morten -Werner Forsbring. The HP scraping was written by me after reading a -nice article in ;login: about how to use WWW::Mechanize, and the IBM -scraping was written by me based on the Dell code. I know the HTML -parsing could be done using nice libraries, but did not want to -introduce more dependencies. This is the current incarnation:
- -
-use LWP::Simple;
-use POSIX;
-use WWW::Mechanize;
-use Date::Parse;
-[...]
-sub get_support_info {
- my ($machine, $model, $serial, $productnumber) = @_;
- my $str;
-
- if ( $model =~ m/^Dell / ) {
- # fetch website from Dell support
- my $url = "http://support.euro.dell.com/support/topics/topic.aspx/emea/shared/support/my_systems_info/no/details?c=no&cs=nodhs1&l=no&s=dhs&ServiceTag=$serial";
- my $webpage = get($url);
- return undef unless ($webpage);
-
- my $daysleft = -1;
- my @lines = split(/\n/, $webpage);
- foreach my $line (@lines) {
- next unless ($line =~ m/Beskrivelse/);
- $line =~ s/<[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $line =~ m%;(\d{2})/(\d{2})/(\d{4});+(\d{2})/(\d{2})/(\d{4});%g;
- my $start = "$3-$1-$2";
- my $end = "$6-$4-$5";
- $str = "$start -> $end";
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($end lt $today);
- }
- } elsif ( $model =~ m/^HP / ) {
- my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
- my $url =
- 'http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/ewarranty/warrantyInput.do';
- $mech->get($url);
- my $fields = {
- 'BODServiceID' => 'NA',
- 'RegisteredPurchaseDate' => '',
- 'country' => 'NO',
- 'productNumber' => $productnumber,
- 'serialNumber1' => $serial,
- };
- $mech->submit_form( form_number => 2,
- fields => $fields );
- # Next step is screen scraping
- my $content = $mech->content();
-
- $content =~ s/<[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
- $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
- $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
-
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
-
- while ($content =~ m/;Warranty Type;/) {
- my ($type, $status, $startstr, $stopstr) = $content =~
- m/;Warranty Type;([^;]+);.+?;Status;(\w+);Start Date;([^;]+);End Date;([^;]+);/;
- $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty Type;//;
- my $start = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($startstr)));
- my $end = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d",
- localtime(str2time($stopstr)));
-
- $str .= "$type ($status) $start -> $end ";
-
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($end lt $today);
- }
- } elsif ( $model =~ m/^IBM / ) {
- my ($producttype) = $model =~ m/.*-\[(.{4}).+\]-/;
- if ($producttype && $serial) {
- my $content =
- get("http://www-947.ibm.com/systems/support/supportsite.wss/warranty?action=warranty&brandind=5000008&Submit=Submit&type=$producttype&serial=$serial");
- if ($content) {
- $content =~ s/<[^>]+?>/;/gm;
- $content =~ s/\s+/ /gm;
- $content =~ s/;\s*;/;;/gm;
- $content =~ s/;[\s;]+/;/gm;
-
- $content =~ s/^.+?;Warranty status;//;
- my ($status, $end) = $content =~ m/;Warranty status;([^;]+)\s*;Expiration date;(\S+) ;/;
-
- $str .= "($status) -> $end ";
-
- my $today = POSIX::strftime("%Y-%m-%d", localtime(time));
- tag_machine_unsupported($machine)
- if ($end lt $today);
- }
- }
- }
- return $str;
-}
-
-
-Here are some examples on how to use the function, using fake -serial numbers. The information passed in as arguments are fetched -from dmidecode.
- -
-print get_support_info("hp.host", "HP ProLiant BL460c G1", "1234567890"
- "447707-B21");
-print get_support_info("dell.host", "Dell Inc. PowerEdge 2950", "1234567");
-print get_support_info("ibm.host", "IBM eserver xSeries 345 -[867061X]-",
- "1234567");
-
-
-I would recommend this approach for tracking support contracts for -everyone with more than a new computers to administer. :)
+Julien Blache +claim that no +patch is better than a useless patch. I completely disagree, as a +patch allow one to discuss a concrete and proposed solution, and also +prove that the issue at hand is important enough for someone to spent +time on fixing it. No patch do not provide any of these positive +properties.