Hostbase & Hostinfo Update

Ken Raffenetti, our newest member of the group, has spent a significant amount of time developing and updating Hostbase.  It’s now far more robust and more suited to the needs of the group for its administration tasks.  However, we realize that our users appreciate this tool, especially its companion “hostinfo”.Fear not!  Ken’s got you covered.  Here’s the announcement, straight from the developer’s keyboard:

For those of you who use the “hostinfo” command from our MCS machines, you may have noticed a change on Wednesday.  Our host data has been moved to a shiny new database and thus needed a new hostinfo tool to allow your queries.  Simply typing “hostinfo” now prints a usage statement with some helpful tips on how to use the command line options.  Typing “hostinfo –showfields” gets a listing of attributes for a host.  Note that some attributes’ names may be different from the previous version.  Query syntax remains largely unchanged.  Bug reports or questions about usage should be sent to [email protected]

We’d like to add that there’s a spiffy web tool you can use as well, as long as you’re onsite or on the VPN.  Check out https://hostbase.mcs.anl.gov.We’re all really please with Ken’s work on this.  Check it out and let us know your thoughts if you think we can tweak it to your needs.  Eventually, we’re planning to allow users to enter their own host data if they’d like, as well.