[RFE] Enable an upload feature

[Peter Matulis]

Getting the output file to its final destination is a big part of the usefulness of this utility. It would be very convenient to have a switch (-u for upload?) that would trigger a dialog to collect information necessary for uploading the file. Default values for dialog questions would be important (and on a per-distro, or some other, basis) as the usefulness of this feature would be significantly lessened if the user had to fill in a bunch of fields. This could take the form of sub-switches where one, in particular, could be targeted at support organizations, for example Canonical Support (cs), for the Ubuntu distro.

$ sudo sosreport -a -u cs

An important element would be authentication as we would not want files ending up in the wrong place. One possibility may be for the support organization to have its receiving (sftp?) server change a global password on a regular (monthly?) basis and email it back to the org.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Bryan Quigley (bryanquigley)]

I was envisioning a URL approach. Alternatively a benefit of the HTTPS method is that we could put a case/organization key into the URL.

HTTPS method
sudo sosreport -a -u https://uploadserver.canonical.com/<custom org or case key>/

SFTP method
Customer has SSH keys registered in launchpad that we pull automatically, taking care of authentication and associating them with a customer organization.
sudo sosreport -a -u sftp://uploadserver.canonical.com <maybe hash of ssh hostkey to verify where its being uploaded to>

Of couse having shortcuts would still be useful!

[Louis Bouchard (louis)]

Here is a recent discussion with sosreport upstream (Bryn Reeves) :

11:20 < caribou> [14:20:22] question : what's the use to keep ftp_upload_url in sos.conf ? No code seems to be using it
11:20 < caribou> [14:22:57] bmr: I'm being asked for a similar functionality : sosreport being able to upload itself somewhere
11:20 < bmr> [18:07:36] caribou, it's on the TODELETE list
11:20 < bmr> [18:09:02] caribou, tbh I am not keen to see upload capabilities re-introduced; they are very hard to get right (portably) in python
11:20 < bmr> [18:09:29] caribou, e.g. ftp upload via python ftp module cannot support proxies (which users ask for every other week when you have basic ftp upload support..)
11:20 < bmr> [18:09:49] caribou, at Red Hat we took the decision that that problem is better handled in integration layers above sos than in the tool itself
11:20 < bmr> [18:10:12] caribou, e.g. things like RHEV integrate it into their UI and for command line users we have a thing called redhat-support-tool
11:20 < bmr> [18:10:40] caribou, file an issue if you want to explore this further but I will take quite a lot of convincing (unless it's something ultra-basic and generic :-)

[Louis Bouchard (louis)]

As outlined by bryn (bmr), the functionality was historically part of sosreport and got deprecated because of many implementation issues.

I do think that carrying an Ubuntu specific patch to enable that is not viable.

This is very much Vendor specific so I would encourage a vendor specific solution.