So, I finally got all the ducks in line enough to let Cinemon do an entirely "remoted" scan of a real CMTS and all of its modems... It was kinda cool. My little workstation here was running both the server and the client, along with another hundred or so processes, including recording video and everything worked quite reasonably. Other than the address in the title bar the remoted system worked and responded indistinguishably from the "local" server.

Then the DNS service died for the server, and the entire box failed to come back after a reboot. Anyway, at least the basic code works now. Using freezer (the security-conscious pickle replacement) the scanner requires about 60% of one CPU on the server. Using cPickle (unsafe) drops that to around 36% of the one CPU. I'll either need to speed up freezer substantially or make a few architectural adjustments so that only trusted machines can be query servers. I'm considering trying something more like a Pythonic "data" language using SimpleParse to read it in, but that won't help at all on the query server side (which is basically just encoding not decoding).

I had to bump up the maximum size of banana messages substantially to make the remote scanning work with a full CMTS's table scans (which can be megabytes of data).