Oh well... would have been nice.
Might be something to add as a feature request. I've been doing
clusters for quite a few years now, and have seen the size of them
increase from commonly less than a hundred hosts to 1000+ in the last
few years. 1000+ is not out of the ordinary now, whereas even 3 years
ago one I did that was 350 hosts would have wound up around #115 in
the top 500 supercomputer list (or so the IBM tech who came by to see
it told me). When the cluster sizes grow like this, the config files
can get kind of unwieldy without some sort of template syntax.
It's too bad there's also not a feature to pull the addr's from the
dns or some other resolution mechanism, and an expression syntax to
define a range of hosts, eg, if you had hosts node0001-node1500, you
could express it in one line as:
+ node[0001-1500] # conn NOPROPRED:+cpu
where the "+" (or some other token) would tell hobbit to do an address
lookup instead of pulling it from the bb-hosts file.
Barring that, the cluster mgmt s/w I use does use a similar type of
syntax for host range definition, and I can always use the cmd-line
tools from that to list the host info for the cluster, then pipe that
through awk/sed and build the client include files on the fly, but it
harks back to the days of perl one-liners. Not that that's
necessarily a bad thing...
johnB
2008/6/10 John Burk <user-fd40c532888d@xymon.invalid>:
Sweet. This is exactly what I was looking for.
I'll experiment tomorrow and see if the var (guess I'll have to start
calling it a macro) can be defined in the body of bb-hosts and still
be evaluated correctly in the include files that contain the client
entries. I'm guessing it will since the section of the hobbit-alerts
manpage that deals with macros mentions that macros can be nested, but
that the inner macro must be defined first. This leads me to believe
that the config file parser reads line-by-line evaluating as it goes.
I'm just going to get started in the next day or two with alerts
within hobbit, hence my unfamiliarity with macros. I had quickly
scanned the hobbit-alerts manpage today but had missed the
significance of the section on macros, mainly because it looked at
first glance to be regex evaluation; the example with
"$WEBHOSTS=%(www|intranet|support|mail).foo.com" caught my eye. Does
the leading '%' always signify some sort of regular expression in
hobbit?
johnB
2008/6/10 Tim McCloskey <user-2644b182ab49@xymon.invalid>:
So I was curious about the whole macro thing and decided to test it out. It
has only been a few minutes but the following seems to work fine. I hope
this helps in some way.
bb-hosts:
$foo="dns"
ipaddress servername # $foo
Regards,
Tim
Tim McCloskey wrote:
As mentioned, perhaps someone with knowledge on the topic can answer.
To extend the question further, since macros (variables) are able to be
used within the hobbit-alerts.cfg file I wonder if variables can be assigned
in bb-hosts and hobbit-clients.cfg? At one point I thought of trying to
keep all of our host/client/alerts data within mysql, but it was only a
thought.
Regards,
Tim
John Burk wrote:
I'm using includes in my bb-hosts to keep the file
length down, but my included files are comprised of hundreds of hosts
all identical except for the ipaddresses and hostnames.
Surely there must be a way to template this, I just can't find it in
the bb-hosts manpage...
...
and so on in mind-numbing repetition...
==============================
I'd like to be able to define the tags in a template, and simply use
that template. Does this mechanism exist in bb-host? That way
if/when I need to change the tags for all my hosts, I only need to do
it in one place, and not on every line in 3 different files.