Old Fastdeploy 0.3 beta PHP code
This is an embarassing yet still evolutionary example of how my coding style has evolved - I hope with a modicum of intelligence.
Though probably uninteresting to most of you here's some historical context for the code:
Fastdeploy, in a nutshell, was intended to be a Web UI front-end and
concomitant abstraction layer between a typical sysadmin's desire to
automate operating system installation and all of the heavy lifting to
get them there (i.e., TFTP, DHCP, manual Kickstart, etc. type files).
I had originally envisioned it as a completely Internet-based service
and in fact wrote an extremely simplistic UI that was linked to
osCommerce and even a very large CRM package called VTiger.
The idea was that you'd order the automation services you wanted; e.g., automation of say 10 server installs and it would flow through an ordering system and customer information would automatically be added to VTiger.
As it happened the idea was overly ambitious for the time and wildly under-developed. Those who were interested wanted it to be in their data center anyway.
I ultimately scrapped that code and developed what you see here -
roughly in the 2008-2009 timeframe. The idea was it would be open source
and I'd (hopefully) make money with freemium and professional services.
Being a dedicated server provider myself at the time my ultimate goal was
to have a business where I was selling the pickaxes and the pans not
mining for gold (i.e., a provider to providers rather than be one myself).
In the meantime life happened and I lost my day job, the dedicated server business ultimately closed down, we moved to another area (North Bay Area), and I changed jobs twice in less than a year after being laid off for nearly a year.
With that for some history these days I've returned to the incipient idea of Fastdeploy as an Internet-based service. iPXE has been the impetus that has encouraged me to revisit that idea and it's truly a fantastic Swiss Army knife for network bootstrapping.
So... for posterity I'm posting the original code for those who were interested in hosting something in-house. It's strikingly obvious evidence that I've never been much of a programmer - in fact, it's a fairly hideous, cobbled- and kludged-together mess - but for those that want some inspiration (probably for how NOT to code) it's here for you.
I won't pretend you should download it and try to get it to work, as that was/is quite a chore in itself. Several PHP PEAR libraries were required as was Smarty. My more modern move to MVC frameworks to develop more compartmentalized and organized code - CodeIgniter, specifically - is not at all in evidence here. Instead it's mostly brute force kludgery and very, very little elegance.
Jim Antoniou