I'm looking for a way to create simple scripts which should be accessible to a technical, though non-programmer, person. These scripts are basically network service checks so I don't need much power: "send this line," "if this line matches, keep going," and "if this line matches, quit immediately." So for HTTP, for example, I'd use something like this:
send "HEAD / HTTP/1.0" send "Host: server.host.name" send "" expect ... "^HTTP/1\.0 200.*" then return success "^HTTP/1\.0 4\d\d.*" then return warning else return error It would also be nice if a more complex version could be written to handle redirects by grepping out the new target and then attempting to fetch that URI, but that's not a requirement. I looked at expect and a pure-Python reimplementation of same, but they both want to spawn external processes. Since I will be running more than 10 checks a second that would be bad. I also need to be able to implement a hard timeout, so if any check takes longer than, for example, 5 seconds, it automatically fails. A log of the transaction would also be good so that we can quickly find out why checks are failing. And another reason not to do this in Python is that I want checks to be configurable on the fly and stored in a database. I know Python can do that but I want them sandboxed so that an error in a user-built script won't take down the entire application. I can roll my own but that would be a PITA so I'd prefer to use an existing package if one exists. Anyone know of any? Thanks! P.S. I will try to monitor the group but email replies would be appreciated. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
