RFC: generic CTRL interface for VTY config settings

[Keith]

On 16/02/2021 09:23, Harald Welte wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> we always had said the VTY is a human CLI, while the CTRL interface is for
> interfacing with other software.  This was primarily related to asking users
> to not parse the VTY output of "show" commands or the like.  

You mean like:

expect -c 'spawn -noecho telnet 0 4260; expect >; send enable\r; expect
#; send "show pdp-context ggsn ggsn0\r"; expect #' | egrep
'IMSI|Control|End-User' | gawk 'BEGIN { RS="IMSI" } /./ { sub(/:[^\$]*/,
"", $10); sub(/\r/, "", $14); print "\033[32;1m SGSN: \
 "$10"\033[30D\033[20C \033[33;1mIP: "$13" "$14"\033[36;1m \033[100D
\033[50C IMSI: "$2"\033[1D \033[0m" }' | sort -t. -n -k3,3n -k4,4n
-k6,6n -k7,7n

:))

Yes, I'm guilty of a lot of this...

But this proposal doesn't actually seem to be about that, but rather
about an automagic way to expose anything added to the config nodes with
SET...


>   SET network.bts#0.trx#1.timeslot#0.training_sequence_code 3
>
which sounds good to me, and I like the dot separator. and replacing
space with #.

I don't think I have a lot of everyday use for modifying runtime
configuration, although I have thought recently that maybe the best way
to recover quickly from a power failure induced msc restart and loss of
volatile VLR is to assign two LAC to each site and alternate them on
restarts, forcing all the MS to LU as soon as the network is back up.

I would probably do this by modifying a config file (with sed or such)
before starting the daemons, but maybe a CTRL command is better, which
would have to be followed by a BTS SI update, right?  but I don't mean
to hijack the thread with that.. :)

Anyway, Matt at UW recently added osmopy/osmo_ipa to the rhizomatica
code, so maybe we'd make more use of CTRL in future.

k.