[nic] General Improvements

[Mike Bydalek]

It's been a long time since I last looked at NIC and today I decided to 
really look at it since a few things have come up where it would be 
*really* nice to use, and I'm just writing to get some feedback on what 
you think of the features I want to add and/or the way I would like to 
do it.

The first thing I wanted to do was use it with some Cisco equipment.  
The problem with this is, of course, there is no Cisco driver!  I 
started to look at the code and thinking about it, and I think the best 
way to do this would be to create just a 'router' device.

The problem with that, of course, is now that each router is going to 
have different oid's the user would want to query.  So, do we have an 
oid param for device router in the devices.php, or is there a better way 
to go about this?  If the same way of doing is kept, a user would need a 
different class per router they wanted to monitor, which wouldn't be a 
good way to go.

The second thing I would like to do is to "upgrade" the graphing.  When 
compared to RRDTool, let's just say it could be better.  What I was 
thinking about doing was adding an option to store data not only in the 
primary driver, but to also use an RRD file format.  That way, all of 
the calculating is done along with a very customizable graphing function.

To implent this, I was thinking about putting a reference to a 
RRD-Driver in Nic_Device_SNMP::retrieveStoreableData() in SNMP.php  In 
here, I would just pass all the data that would need to be stored to the 
RRD file which can be pulled seperately, or all together, via. rrdgraph.

The downside of this is that there's actually duplicate storage devices 
being used, sql and rrd.  Personally, this wouldn't be a bad way to go 
as the stats and whatnot can more easily get the recent data from the 
SQL driver, and the rrd can be used solely for graphs.  My only 
hesitation with this is that it's "not the Horde way" (or at least what 
I've learned to think the "Horde way" is...).

Comments and questions would be greatly appreciated before I begin to 
goto work on this as I really don't want to do it all one way, and then 
learn that there was a completely better way and I've wasted all my time!

Regards,
Mike