Dave Parce wrote at about 14:16:07 +0000 on Saturday, January 8, 2011:
 > Before I go write something myself, I'm curious if anyone knows if this has 
 > already been done.
 > 
 > My questions are:
 > 1) Has anyone seen anything like this done before? Even a part 
 > of it? 
 > 2) Is there any interest in adding such functionality to BackupPC? If so, 
 > I would certainly be willing to submit this code to the BackupPC developers.
 > 
 > Short description: A "host discovery" action is kicked off at regular 
 > intervals. 
 > When a host is found that is not already in the hosts files and if it is not 
 > in 
 > an "ignore" file, it is added to the hosts file.
 > 
 > Longer description: The IP ranges defined in $Conf{DHCPAddressRanges} are 
 > scanned for active computers. The computer name is determined and if it does 
 > not 
 > exist in an "ignore host" file (like for routers, switches or personal 
 > computers), it would be added to the hosts file as an "inactive" host (if it 
 > does not already have an entry in the hosts file).

How would you determine the "computer name"? Particularly, for static
IP addresses.
And if you found a new IP address, how would you make sure that it is
not an existing machine that had previously been under another ip
address.

 > 
 > Functionality would have to be added to the hosts file code to implement an 
 > "enable" flag. Hosts added through the web interface would default to 
 > enabled. 
 > Hosts added via the discovery script would default to disabled.
 > 
 > A checkbox would need to be added to the "Edit hosts" screen for "enable". A 
 > separate screen would need to be added to manage the "ignore hosts" file.
 > 
 > Basically, here is my idea: A brand new BackupPC installation is created. 
 > Hosts 
 > could be added by hand, but you may not know the names. The discovery script 
 > would run and enter a bunch of disabled hosts. Some hosts like routers would 
 > be 
 > "ignored". The rest could be enabled.
 > 
 > If you have a reasonably configured collection of computers (like a bunch of 
 > Windows computers in a domain), all of them would be setup to back up very 
 > quickly.
 > 
 > At worst, you at least have a list of names now to investigate how to back 
 > them 
 > up.
 > 
 > Comments?

Personally I don't see this as a valuable or even good feature to
add. Backups to me are too important to rely on hoping that scanning
ip addresses will make it all work properly.

How often do you add new machines to your network?
- If not very frequently, then how hard is it to manually add a line
  to the hosts file?
- If very frequently, then presumably you have install scripts that
  setup lots of other things both on your new computers and on the
  network. And if you are doing that already, how hard would it be to add a
  line to your install scripts that just appends a new line to your
  hosts file with the new computer name

So, in summary it seems to me like little gain for something that is
potentially a bad thing to automate in the first place.

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