[Phoenix-pm] greetings

[Artful]

> Hmmm...these all sound interesting so maybe I should ask a pointed
> question now.  I do a lot of net admin stuff involving SNMP polling and
> currently most of my tools are "single-threaded", i.e. I poll one device
> at a time.  Based on the options presented, what would be the easiest
> means of changing to a setup of polling say 10 devices at the same time
> with the main script retaining control and reporting responsibilities?

I would highly suggest Parallel::ForkManager for this task.  A real
threaded solution would probably be way overkill for what you are doing. 
I use Parallel::ForkManager all the time, it works very well.  The
following code will run 3 child processes in parallel.  The module handles
all of the forking and keeping track of how many children have been
forked.  The wait_all_children() will block until all of the child
processes have finished, so you don't print out the stats until all of the
processes have completed.


#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Parallel::ForkManager;

my $MAX_PROCESSES = 3;
my @hosts = ('dopey', 'grumpy', 'doc', 'happy', 'bashful', 'sneezy',
'sleepy');

$pm = new Parallel::ForkManager($MAX_PROCESSES);

my %snmp_info;
foreach my $host (@hosts) {
     $pm->start and next;

     $snmp_info{$host} = &get_snmp_info($host);

     $pm->finish;
}

$pm->wait_all_children;

foreach my $host (sort @hosts) {
     print "$host: $snmp_info{$host}\n";
}