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big brother replacement

list Josh Luthman
Fri, 2 Nov 2007 22:46:05 -0400
Message-Id: <user-c55b22409e58@xymon.invalid>

I really like this mailing list - you learn quite a bit even just by reading
the questions of others.  I'm the only system administrator around here so I
need a shoulder to lean on every once and a while!

Are you saying you've used BB so much that you know it too well and need a
replacement?  Sounds kind of backwards to me =P

On 11/2/07, joe <user-b1d2c84d244b@xymon.invalid> wrote:
We have no official bb support, just google, and the experience of local
sys
admins. But it's been here so long that infrastructure has grown up around
it,
which really drives the need for a drop-in replacement.

Joe

Josh Luthman wrote:
Joe,

Do you have any support to any extent with BB?  The main reason I
switched was that there was a mailing list to look to for support.
Secondly, it wasn't BB.

Josh

On 11/2/07, *Sloan* <user-b1d2c84d244b@xymon.invalid <mailto:user-b1d2c84d244b@xymon.invalid>> wrote:

    Deiss, Mark wrote:
For a vanilla BB environment, you can have multiple BBDISPLAY
entities
but the recommendation is that there is only one BBNET entity. A
BBNET
server that is generating the pings out to the clients will be
    sending
the ping results to all of the BBDISPLAY entities (as defined on
the
BBNET host). If you have multiple BBNET entities that ping the
same
servers, you will be sending duplicated results as far as the
individual BBDISPLAY servers are concerned (the connection
messages
will be renamed to the host being pinged). To support multiple
BBNETs
in a non-race environment requires additional coding to carefully
direct the BBNET results to not trip over each other. The default
behavior is to pump them out to whatever BBDISPLAY is listed - you
get
the race conditions when you want all the BBDISPLAY servers to
    monitor
all of the BBNET hosts (i.e. want BBNET to send their client-side
tests to the BBDISPLAY entities - this will result in the BBNET
poll
messages going out to all the BBDISPLAY entities also).
    Interestingly enough, we've been running redundant bb servers for
each
    lan, without any concern for race conditions and while that has it's
own
    peculiar behavior in corner cases, we've never seen any sort of
real,
    intractable problems with it. The general consensus here is that
    redundancy is good, except for the notifications - we don't want to
be
    notified twice for every incident, thus the so-called bb "failover"
    capability saves us that annoyance with no extra hacks required.

    I probably made it sound a lot more sophisticated than it really is
- we
    really just have active/active BBNET/BBDISPLAY servers, with the
    delegation of BBPAGER decided by the failover status.

    It looks like Henrik has a good roadmap to get there in 4.3 from
what I
    read here, so hopefully we've got our bb replacement at last. The
only
    other concern is that we copy all bb notifications as snmp traps to
    netcool, but it looks as though that should be with a hobbit plugin.

    Joe


--
Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
--- Henry Spencer
-- 
Josh Luthman
Office: XXX-XXX-XXXX
Direct: XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXXX Wayne St
Suite XXXX
Troy, OH XXXXX

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
--- Henry Spencer