nci/netconfig

[Jason Russell]

So this is one of those random things I think quite a few of us have stumbled across. One of those really well done tools that have almost zero documentation. It’s “documented” within the command, and most of the functionality is pretty straight forward. We use it to parse netconfig down to a certain point, then display thread connectivity information across all sites quickly, being able to filter on items as well.

However, there is one thing I want to do and it’s display the value within certain fields (namely the host field) instead of a global variable. So for example, we connect to Epic on multiple ports. Instead of modifying the host name for each connection, we have a global variable in our master file (SRV_EPIC) and use $$SRV_EPIC in the host field. When using netconfig/nci, it resolves the global variable to the correct host name. This is normally fine, but it creates two issues:

1 – Sometimes we want to be able to see the actual variable ($$SRV_EPIC instead of epic-odb-tst), and also be able to mark on the host name it is a global variable (IE: with an asterisk or something similar).

2 – If I am not in a site connected to master (IE: ours defaults to a scl_master) it will throw a lot of errors when trying to resolve the variables.

Number 2 can be worked around (though not in TCL — That’s another issue I still don’t have a resolution to. Being able to change the site from within TCL so it affects the current TCL environment – different issue though), but shouldn’t have to.

Number 1 – This is the bigger ask. Do we know if there is a way to stop the nci script from resolving the global variables?

Topic