I spend this evening writing a webservice to display information about hosts on my LAN. Being a PHP programmer, I, of course, wrote it in PHP, using a library called NuSOAP.

SOAP is a standard for exchanging XML between a client and sever app, like XMLRPC, but a bit more complex. Basically, you send a server a specially-formated request, and it sends one back. This all happens over HTTP, so one does not have to worry about packets or anything.

After reading Scott Nichol’s great SOAP tutorials, I began tinkering around. What I came up with was a service that allows me to get my network weather, information about hosts, and the version of the webservice. I also have a ghetto-debug-client for it.

NuSOAP generated a very nice page that serves as crude documentation generated from the WSDL.

Feel free to write your own client to use the functions (don’t touch the uptime one, it’ll just give you an error), or see the one here.

You can change the URL to make calls - version for the version, info and host for the get_info, and weather (what the link links to) for network weather.

I’m going to do a few more statistics, hopefully polled live from my boxen. Once I finish OwlInfo enough for it to be useful, I’ll write a plugin for WordPress so I can show my network weather on the menu bar.