Hobbit 4.1.0 available - includes Unix client 🔗 link

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Hobbit 4.1.0 is available now on http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/, and
will be uploaded to Sourceforge in a few hours as I get the pre-
compiled binary packages ready.

This release fixes a number of bugs in the previous version (4.0.4),
most notably some bugs that could allow an attacker to crash the
Hobbit server by sending certain malformed messages to the Hobbit
server. It is therefore recommended that you upgrade your Hobbit
installation.

This release also has some optimizations in the hobbitd and
hobbitd_alert tools, that improve the performance of Hobbit in
large installations.

The big change causing the version number to go from 4.0 -> 4.1,
however, is the addition of a brand new Hobbit client implementation.

The Hobbit client is included with support for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX (untested) and Darwin (untested). Support
for other Unix-like operating systems will appear as soon as 
possible; support for Windows-based systems is not currently planned,
but will most likely appear later this year.

The Hobbit client reports data for the "cpu", "disk", "memory" and
"procs" columns in Hobbit, as well as feeding the "netstat" and
"vmstat" graphs. It does not currenly handle system log monitoring
(the "msgs" status column). The Hobbit client is compatible with
most extension scripts written for the Big Brother client.

Unlike other client implementations, the Hobbit client has no
client-side configuration. All disk thresholds, process checks etc.
are configured on the Hobbit server; no configuration is needed on
the systems running the Hobbit client. See the etc/hobbit-clients.cfg
file on your Hobbit server for a description of how to configure
the client software.

The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
a Hobbit server is installed. Client-only installations are described
in the README.CLIENT file included with Hobbit 4.1.


Regards,
Henrik


Changes from 4.0.4 -> 4.1.0

A Hobbit client for Unix systems has been implemented,
and this was found important enough to warrant bumping 
the version number to 4.1.

The README.CLIENT file has the details on how to use it.
The client is automatically installed as part of a 
server installation.

Server bugfixes:
* [SECURITY] The Hobbit daemon (hobbitd) could crash when 
  processing certain types of messages. It is believed that
  this could only be used for a denial-of-service attack
  against Hobbit, although it cannot completely be ruled
  out that an attacker might be able to exploit it to run
  arbitrary code with the privileges of the hobbit user.
  Thanks to Vernon Everett and Stefan Loos for their efforts
  in helping me track down these bugs.
* Workaround a bug in KHTML based browsers (KDE's Konqueror,
  Mac OS X Safari) when generating reports: They cannot handle
  "multipart/mixed" documents, but only offer to save the 
  document instead of sending you off to the report URL.
* Fix a build problem on OpenBSD: Apparently OpenBSD's linker
  does not recognize the --rpath option.
* A memory leak in the Hobbit daemon has been fixed (it would
  leak memory upon each reload of the bb-hosts file, which is
  done every 5 minutes).
* Status messages using "&green" or another color in the first
  line of the status message would display the "&green" text 
  instead of the color GIF image.
* bbtest-net's collection of DNS responses has been delayed until
  an actual test is queued. Previously, a host with a "testip"
  flag could end up with a DNS lookup which doesn't really
  make sense.
* Handling of the "notrends" tag was broken.
* The duration string should no longer be included in the
  webpage showing a disabled test. (Only applies to tests
  disabled after installing Hobbit 4.0.5).
* bbtest-net now reports "Hobbit" in the User-Agent header
  of all web requests, instead of "BigBrother".
* If an alert was configured to be sent only during certain
  periods of time, the recovery message would be suppressed if
  the recovery happened outside of the alerting period. Changed
  so that recovery messages ignore the time-based restrictions.
* hobbit-mailack would generate ack's valid for 30 minutes, instead
  of the documented 60 minutes. Changed to use 60 minutes.
* An off-by-one error in the routine generating the HTML document
  headers and footers was caught by Valgrind.
* A number of minor documentation fixes.
* Memory reports from Win32 clients using the Big Brother client
  could trigger an overflow when calculating the memory usage,
  resulting in memory utilization being reported as 0. Changed
  to use a larger internal representation for the memory sizes.

Server improvements:
* A new reporting tool, hobbit-confreport.cgi, provides a 
  way of generating a printable report summarizing the Hobbit
  monitoring configuration for a single server or a group of
  servers.
* If a "custom" directory exists, you can have custom Hobbit
  tools located there and have them built during the normal 
  build proces.
* A status handed off to the hobbitd_alert module, but for which
  there is no alert recipient configured, would be re-checked
  every minute causing a heavy spike in the CPU load if there
  were many such statuses. A small code change allows us to 
  skip these until the configuration file changes.
* The code handling lookups of data from the bb-hosts file was
  changed to access the data via a tree-based search instead of
  a linear search. On large systems this provides a much more
  efficient retrieval of these data, reducing the overall load
  of Hobbit.
* The internal representation of status-data inside the hobbitd
  daemon now uses a more efficient tree-structure instead of a
  simple linked list.
* The NETFAILTEXT environment variable can be used to change
  the "not OK" text added to status messages of failed network
  tests.
* External commands used in network testing (ntpdate, rpcinfo,
  traceroute) now have max. 30 seconds to complete. This is to
  avoid a broken ntpdate or similar to lock up the network tests.
  The "--cmdtimeout=N" option controls the length of the timeout.
* hobbitlaunch no longer logs every task started to the 
  hobbitlaunch.log file - this could result in the log file growing
  to huge proportions. The "--verbose" option for hobbitlaunch 
  will restore the old behaviour, if needed.
* A number of arbitrary limits on the size of various buffers,
  messages, queries and responses have been removed. Hobbit will
  now handle status-messages of practically any size, except
  that the interface between the main daemon and the worker modules
  (handling history, RRD files and alerts) is limited to 100 KB
  message size. Configuration files (bb-hosts, hobbit-alerts.cfg,
  hobbitserver.cfg, hobbitlaunch.cfg) can have lines of any length.
  Continuation lines are now supported in all configuration files.
* The moverrd.sh is now included in the default installation.
* OpenBSD vmstat output now supported.


LARRD / Hobbit cleanup:
Upon request from Craig Cook, the code and docs were changed to
clarify that Hobbit and LARRD are not related. I therefore
decided to remove references to "LARRD" in the configuration files,
resulting in these changes:

* LARRDCOLUMN renamed to TRENDSCOLUMN, and LARRDS renamed to TEST2RRD 
  in hobbitserver.cfg (handled automatically by "make install").
* The bb-hosts "LARRD:" tag was renamed to "TRENDS:". Existing bb-hosts
  files using the old tag still work, though.
* The hobbitd_larrd program were renamed to hobbitd_rrd. The default
  hobbitlaunch.cfg file was also changed to reflect this, and the
  names of the logfiles from the two RRD update tasks were changed as
  well. All of this should happen automatically when running "make
  install", but if you have added extra options - e.g. for custom graphs -
  then you may need to re-do those modifications in hobbitlaunch.cfg.

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Hobbit 4.1.0 is available now on http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/, and
will be uploaded to Sourceforge in a few hours as I get the pre-
compiled binary packages ready.

This release fixes a number of bugs in the previous version (4.0.4),
most notably some bugs that could allow an attacker to crash the
Hobbit server by sending certain malformed messages to the Hobbit
server. It is therefore recommended that you upgrade your Hobbit
installation.

This release also has some optimizations in the hobbitd and
hobbitd_alert tools, that improve the performance of Hobbit in
large installations.

The big change causing the version number to go from 4.0 -> 4.1,
however, is the addition of a brand new Hobbit client implementation.

The Hobbit client is included with support for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX (untested) and Darwin (untested). Support
for other Unix-like operating systems will appear as soon as 
possible; support for Windows-based systems is not currently planned,
but will most likely appear later this year.

The Hobbit client reports data for the "cpu", "disk", "memory" and
"procs" columns in Hobbit, as well as feeding the "netstat" and
"vmstat" graphs. It does not currenly handle system log monitoring
(the "msgs" status column). The Hobbit client is compatible with
most extension scripts written for the Big Brother client.

Unlike other client implementations, the Hobbit client has no
client-side configuration. All disk thresholds, process checks etc.
are configured on the Hobbit server; no configuration is needed on
the systems running the Hobbit client. See the etc/hobbit-clients.cfg
file on your Hobbit server for a description of how to configure
the client software.

The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
a Hobbit server is installed. Client-only installations are described
in the README.CLIENT file included with Hobbit 4.1.


Regards,
Henrik


Changes from 4.0.4 -> 4.1.0

A Hobbit client for Unix systems has been implemented,
and this was found important enough to warrant bumping 
the version number to 4.1.

The README.CLIENT file has the details on how to use it.
The client is automatically installed as part of a 
server installation.

Server bugfixes:
* [SECURITY] The Hobbit daemon (hobbitd) could crash when 
  processing certain types of messages. It is believed that
  this could only be used for a denial-of-service attack
  against Hobbit, although it cannot completely be ruled
  out that an attacker might be able to exploit it to run
  arbitrary code with the privileges of the hobbit user.
  Thanks to Vernon Everett and Stefan Loos for their efforts
  in helping me track down these bugs.
* Workaround a bug in KHTML based browsers (KDE's Konqueror,
  Mac OS X Safari) when generating reports: They cannot handle
  "multipart/mixed" documents, but only offer to save the 
  document instead of sending you off to the report URL.
* Fix a build problem on OpenBSD: Apparently OpenBSD's linker
  does not recognize the --rpath option.
* A memory leak in the Hobbit daemon has been fixed (it would
  leak memory upon each reload of the bb-hosts file, which is
  done every 5 minutes).
* Status messages using "&green" or another color in the first
  line of the status message would display the "&green" text 
  instead of the color GIF image.
* bbtest-net's collection of DNS responses has been delayed until
  an actual test is queued. Previously, a host with a "testip"
  flag could end up with a DNS lookup which doesn't really
  make sense.
* Handling of the "notrends" tag was broken.
* The duration string should no longer be included in the
  webpage showing a disabled test. (Only applies to tests
  disabled after installing Hobbit 4.0.5).
* bbtest-net now reports "Hobbit" in the User-Agent header
  of all web requests, instead of "BigBrother".
* If an alert was configured to be sent only during certain
  periods of time, the recovery message would be suppressed if
  the recovery happened outside of the alerting period. Changed
  so that recovery messages ignore the time-based restrictions.
* hobbit-mailack would generate ack's valid for 30 minutes, instead
  of the documented 60 minutes. Changed to use 60 minutes.
* An off-by-one error in the routine generating the HTML document
  headers and footers was caught by Valgrind.
* A number of minor documentation fixes.
* Memory reports from Win32 clients using the Big Brother client
  could trigger an overflow when calculating the memory usage,
  resulting in memory utilization being reported as 0. Changed
  to use a larger internal representation for the memory sizes.

Server improvements:
* A new reporting tool, hobbit-confreport.cgi, provides a 
  way of generating a printable report summarizing the Hobbit
  monitoring configuration for a single server or a group of
  servers.
* If a "custom" directory exists, you can have custom Hobbit
  tools located there and have them built during the normal 
  build proces.
* A status handed off to the hobbitd_alert module, but for which
  there is no alert recipient configured, would be re-checked
  every minute causing a heavy spike in the CPU load if there
  were many such statuses. A small code change allows us to 
  skip these until the configuration file changes.
* The code handling lookups of data from the bb-hosts file was
  changed to access the data via a tree-based search instead of
  a linear search. On large systems this provides a much more
  efficient retrieval of these data, reducing the overall load
  of Hobbit.
* The internal representation of status-data inside the hobbitd
  daemon now uses a more efficient tree-structure instead of a
  simple linked list.
* The NETFAILTEXT environment variable can be used to change
  the "not OK" text added to status messages of failed network
  tests.
* External commands used in network testing (ntpdate, rpcinfo,
  traceroute) now have max. 30 seconds to complete. This is to
  avoid a broken ntpdate or similar to lock up the network tests.
  The "--cmdtimeout=N" option controls the length of the timeout.
* hobbitlaunch no longer logs every task started to the 
  hobbitlaunch.log file - this could result in the log file growing
  to huge proportions. The "--verbose" option for hobbitlaunch 
  will restore the old behaviour, if needed.
* A number of arbitrary limits on the size of various buffers,
  messages, queries and responses have been removed. Hobbit will
  now handle status-messages of practically any size, except
  that the interface between the main daemon and the worker modules
  (handling history, RRD files and alerts) is limited to 100 KB
  message size. Configuration files (bb-hosts, hobbit-alerts.cfg,
  hobbitserver.cfg, hobbitlaunch.cfg) can have lines of any length.
  Continuation lines are now supported in all configuration files.
* The moverrd.sh is now included in the default installation.
* OpenBSD vmstat output now supported.


LARRD / Hobbit cleanup:
Upon request from Craig Cook, the code and docs were changed to
clarify that Hobbit and LARRD are not related. I therefore
decided to remove references to "LARRD" in the configuration files,
resulting in these changes:

* LARRDCOLUMN renamed to TRENDSCOLUMN, and LARRDS renamed to TEST2RRD 
  in hobbitserver.cfg (handled automatically by "make install").
* The bb-hosts "LARRD:" tag was renamed to "TRENDS:". Existing bb-hosts
  files using the old tag still work, though.
* The hobbitd_larrd program were renamed to hobbitd_rrd. The default
  hobbitlaunch.cfg file was also changed to reflect this, and the
  names of the logfiles from the two RRD update tasks were changed as
  well. All of this should happen automatically when running "make
  install", but if you have added extra options - e.g. for custom graphs -
  then you may need to re-do those modifications in hobbitlaunch.cfg.

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 03:36:55AM +0000, David Gore wrote:

I know this may not be supported by I am trying to compile the client on 
Digital UNIX 4.0f using gcc version 2.95.  Is this error because I need 
a new version of gcc which I may not be able to do on DGUX 4.0f?  Any ideas?

gcc -g -O -D_REENTRANT -DNO_VSNPRINTF -DOSF -I. 
-I/var/tmp/hobbit-4.1.0/include -I. -I../include    -c -o sendmsg.o 
sendmsg.c
sendmsg.c: In function `sendtobbd':
sendmsg.c:318: `socklen_t' undeclared (first use in this function)

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Hobbit 4.1.0 is available now on http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/, and
will be uploaded to Sourceforge in a few hours as I get the pre-
compiled binary packages ready.

This release fixes a number of bugs in the previous version (4.0.4),
most notably some bugs that could allow an attacker to crash the
Hobbit server by sending certain malformed messages to the Hobbit
server. It is therefore recommended that you upgrade your Hobbit
installation.

This release also has some optimizations in the hobbitd and
hobbitd_alert tools, that improve the performance of Hobbit in
large installations.

The big change causing the version number to go from 4.0 -> 4.1,
however, is the addition of a brand new Hobbit client implementation.

The Hobbit client is included with support for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX (untested) and Darwin (untested). Support
for other Unix-like operating systems will appear as soon as 
possible; support for Windows-based systems is not currently planned,
but will most likely appear later this year.

The Hobbit client reports data for the "cpu", "disk", "memory" and
"procs" columns in Hobbit, as well as feeding the "netstat" and
"vmstat" graphs. It does not currenly handle system log monitoring
(the "msgs" status column). The Hobbit client is compatible with
most extension scripts written for the Big Brother client.

Unlike other client implementations, the Hobbit client has no
client-side configuration. All disk thresholds, process checks etc.
are configured on the Hobbit server; no configuration is needed on
the systems running the Hobbit client. See the etc/hobbit-clients.cfg
file on your Hobbit server for a description of how to configure
the client software.

The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
a Hobbit server is installed. Client-only installations are described
in the README.CLIENT file included with Hobbit 4.1.


Regards,
Henrik

 
Changes from 4.0.4 -> 4.1.0

A Hobbit client for Unix systems has been implemented,
and this was found important enough to warrant bumping 
the version number to 4.1.

The README.CLIENT file has the details on how to use it.
The client is automatically installed as part of a 
server installation.

Server bugfixes:
* [SECURITY] The Hobbit daemon (hobbitd) could crash when 
 processing certain types of messages. It is believed that
 this could only be used for a denial-of-service attack
 against Hobbit, although it cannot completely be ruled
 out that an attacker might be able to exploit it to run
 arbitrary code with the privileges of the hobbit user.
 Thanks to Vernon Everett and Stefan Loos for their efforts
 in helping me track down these bugs.
* Workaround a bug in KHTML based browsers (KDE's Konqueror,
 Mac OS X Safari) when generating reports: They cannot handle
 "multipart/mixed" documents, but only offer to save the 
 document instead of sending you off to the report URL.
* Fix a build problem on OpenBSD: Apparently OpenBSD's linker
 does not recognize the --rpath option.
* A memory leak in the Hobbit daemon has been fixed (it would
 leak memory upon each reload of the bb-hosts file, which is
 done every 5 minutes).
* Status messages using "&green" or another color in the first
 line of the status message would display the "&green" text 
 instead of the color GIF image.
* bbtest-net's collection of DNS responses has been delayed until
 an actual test is queued. Previously, a host with a "testip"
 flag could end up with a DNS lookup which doesn't really
 make sense.
* Handling of the "notrends" tag was broken.
* The duration string should no longer be included in the
 webpage showing a disabled test. (Only applies to tests
 disabled after installing Hobbit 4.0.5).
* bbtest-net now reports "Hobbit" in the User-Agent header
 of all web requests, instead of "BigBrother".
* If an alert was configured to be sent only during certain
 periods of time, the recovery message would be suppressed if
 the recovery happened outside of the alerting period. Changed
 so that recovery messages ignore the time-based restrictions.
* hobbit-mailack would generate ack's valid for 30 minutes, instead
 of the documented 60 minutes. Changed to use 60 minutes.
* An off-by-one error in the routine generating the HTML document
 headers and footers was caught by Valgrind.
* A number of minor documentation fixes.
* Memory reports from Win32 clients using the Big Brother client
 could trigger an overflow when calculating the memory usage,
 resulting in memory utilization being reported as 0. Changed
 to use a larger internal representation for the memory sizes.

Server improvements:
* A new reporting tool, hobbit-confreport.cgi, provides a 
 way of generating a printable report summarizing the Hobbit
 monitoring configuration for a single server or a group of
 servers.
* If a "custom" directory exists, you can have custom Hobbit
 tools located there and have them built during the normal 
 build proces.
* A status handed off to the hobbitd_alert module, but for which
 there is no alert recipient configured, would be re-checked
 every minute causing a heavy spike in the CPU load if there
 were many such statuses. A small code change allows us to 
 skip these until the configuration file changes.
* The code handling lookups of data from the bb-hosts file was
 changed to access the data via a tree-based search instead of
 a linear search. On large systems this provides a much more
 efficient retrieval of these data, reducing the overall load
 of Hobbit.
* The internal representation of status-data inside the hobbitd
 daemon now uses a more efficient tree-structure instead of a
 simple linked list.
* The NETFAILTEXT environment variable can be used to change
 the "not OK" text added to status messages of failed network
 tests.
* External commands used in network testing (ntpdate, rpcinfo,
 traceroute) now have max. 30 seconds to complete. This is to
 avoid a broken ntpdate or similar to lock up the network tests.
 The "--cmdtimeout=N" option controls the length of the timeout.
* hobbitlaunch no longer logs every task started to the 
 hobbitlaunch.log file - this could result in the log file growing
 to huge proportions. The "--verbose" option for hobbitlaunch 
 will restore the old behaviour, if needed.
* A number of arbitrary limits on the size of various buffers,
 messages, queries and responses have been removed. Hobbit will
 now handle status-messages of practically any size, except
 that the interface between the main daemon and the worker modules
 (handling history, RRD files and alerts) is limited to 100 KB
 message size. Configuration files (bb-hosts, hobbit-alerts.cfg,
 hobbitserver.cfg, hobbitlaunch.cfg) can have lines of any length.
 Continuation lines are now supported in all configuration files.
* The moverrd.sh is now included in the default installation.
* OpenBSD vmstat output now supported.


LARRD / Hobbit cleanup:
Upon request from Craig Cook, the code and docs were changed to
clarify that Hobbit and LARRD are not related. I therefore
decided to remove references to "LARRD" in the configuration files,
resulting in these changes:

* LARRDCOLUMN renamed to TRENDSCOLUMN, and LARRDS renamed to TEST2RRD 
 in hobbitserver.cfg (handled automatically by "make install").
* The bb-hosts "LARRD:" tag was renamed to "TRENDS:". Existing bb-hosts
 files using the old tag still work, though.
* The hobbitd_larrd program were renamed to hobbitd_rrd. The default
 hobbitlaunch.cfg file was also changed to reflect this, and the
 names of the logfiles from the two RRD update tasks were changed as
 well. All of this should happen automatically when running "make
 install", but if you have added extra options - e.g. for custom graphs -
 then you may need to re-do those modifications in hobbitlaunch.cfg.

-- 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 08:40:33AM -0400, Michael Nemeth wrote:

Will the  new hobbit client work with the 4.0.4 server?

I HAVE successful compiled the server  on my HP-UX system!  Ive not 
installed and tested yet because Ive some
custom stuff to worry about!

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 08:40:33AM -0400, Michael Nemeth wrote:
 

Will the  new hobbit client work with the 4.0.4 server?
   

No, you need 4.1 on the server. The new clients don't generate
any status messages themselves, they just collect a bunch of
output from various commands. It's the server that takes care
of generating the cpu, disk, procs, memory etc. status-messages.

So you need the new server.

 

I HAVE successful compiled the server  on my HP-UX system!  Ive not 
installed and tested yet because Ive some
custom stuff to worry about!
   

Thanks, my usual HP-UX tester is off-line for a couple of weeks, so
it was nice to get that confirmation.


Regards,
Henrik

-- 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
|     _p_       Mike Nemeth
|  ___| |_____  email(w) user-609d3fab5b2d@xymon.invalid Work: XXX XXX-XXXX          
|><___________)          |               Home Page:http://www.geocities.com/mjnemeth/
|               Work Page:http://faraday.motown.lmco.com:3000/~nemethm/ 
|               Work Page:http://ortsweb/~mnemeth/ 
|++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 02:29:37PM +0100, Fabio Flores wrote:

Im still getting an error while compiling Hobbit 4.1. Anyone could help?
cd etcfiles; ../../build/merge-sects hobbitlaunch.cfg
/usr/local/hobbit/server/etc/hobbitlaunch.cfg larrdstatus=rrdstatus
larrddata=rrddata
Segmentation Fault - core dumped

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 03:36:55AM +0000, David Gore wrote:

I know this may not be supported by I am trying to compile the client on 
Digital UNIX 4.0f using gcc version 2.95.  Is this error because I need 
a new version of gcc which I may not be able to do on DGUX 4.0f?  Any ideas?

gcc -g -O -D_REENTRANT -DNO_VSNPRINTF -DOSF -I. 
-I/var/tmp/hobbit-4.1.0/include -I. -I../include    -c -o sendmsg.o 
sendmsg.c
sendmsg.c: In function `sendtobbd':
sendmsg.c:318: `socklen_t' undeclared (first use in this function)

"socklen_t" is one of those POSIX datatypes that apparently don't
exist on some of the "earlier" Unix'es. For a quick fix, edit the
lib/sendmsg.c file and on line 318 replace "socklen_t" with "int".

However, for the client to work you'll need to create a
client/hobbitclient-osf.sh script to collect the information from
your system; you can probably use one of the existing scripts
as a template. When you have that script working, the hobbitd_client 
needs an update to recognize the data you send to it, so send me
a copy of the output from your client script, and I'll work it
into the back-end module.

The most tricky stuff in the client appears to be getting the 
information about total and available RAM; at least, that is
the area where I had to do some work on the client. Apart from
that, just make sure you get a good "ps" listing and a "df" 
output that has one line per filesystem.

Regards,
Henrik

The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
a Hobbit server is installed. 

On Fri, Aug 12, 2005 at 12:23:06PM +1000, Adam Goryachev wrote:

After upgrading to the 4.1.1-1 debian package, I thought "great, I can
just stop the BB client and see what happens"...

Well, not much happened, except the status logs stopped updating.

It looks like there might be a few things missing:

1) a init script to start the client

The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
a Hobbit server is installed. 

Nope, it wasn't... or did I do something wrong?

Client-only installations are described in the README.CLIENT file included with Hobbit 4.1.

2) Documentation, this file is missing in the deb package, and probably
other docs might be missing as well, so it makes me feel better as to
why I haven't got the client working yet...

Also, it would be really nice if we had a deb package which included
just the client. Then, we could have a hobbit-server package and a
hobbit-client package. We don't need to install the hobbit server on
every machine we want to monitor, just the client, and we retain the
advantage of using deb package management features...

On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 07:46 -0500, user-e3a6ebbee6cd@xymon.invalid wrote:

I have a strange problem with some clients, I would appreciate any
suggestions if anyone has seen it or can give any ideas about the
problem. I have a number of servers running RedHat AS 2.1, RedHat AS
3, and Fedora with my hobbit server on Fedora Core 4. I built the
client on one AS 2.1 server, then created a tarball and copied all
files over to all other AS 2.1 servers. More than half work with no
problem, reporting memory, CPU, disk etc, but some don't report
anything. I stopped the client and removed all files, then rebuilt the
client using ./configure --client; make; make install  which worked
with no errors. I see no errors in my hobbit server logs, and I can
telnet from the clients to the server on port 1984 with no problem. 
The hobbit client seems to be running properly, and I don't see
anything unusual in the logs. 
# ps -elf | grep hobbit 040 S hobbit   25382     1  0  75   0    -   363 schedu Aug31 ?
 00:00:00 /home/hobbit/client/bin/hobbitlaunch
--config=/home/hobbit/client/etc/clientlaun 000 S hobbit   28365     1  0  85   5    -   561 wait4  08:37 ?
 00:00:00 sh -c vmstat 300 2
1>/home/hobbit/client/tmp/hobbit_vmstat.28352 2>&1; mv /home/ 000 S hobbit   28368 28365  0  82   5    -   363 schedu 08:37 ?
 00:00:00 vmstat 300 2 000 S root     28925 28788  0  76   0    -   436 pipe_w 08:41 pts/0
 00:00:00 grep hobbit 
# pwd /home/hobbit/client/logs 
# ls -al total 2 -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        139 Aug 31 12:31
clientlaunch.log -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit          6 Aug 31 12:31
clientlaunch.pid -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit          0 Aug 31 12:31
hobbitclient.log 
# cat clientlaunch.log 2005-08-31 12:31:45 hobbitlaunch starting 2005-08-31 12:31:45 Loading tasklist configuration
from /home/hobbit/client/etc/clientlaunch.cfg

This behavior is usually caused by the host names not agreeing between
the hobbit client and server. The hobbit client uses the return from
'uname -n' for the name it reports to the server. If this doesn't match
whats in bb-hosts, hobbitd will just discard the message.

Thanks,
Larry Barber


On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 07:46 -0500, user-e3a6ebbee6cd@xymon.invalid wrote:

I have a strange problem with some clients, I would appreciate any
suggestions if anyone has seen it or can give any ideas about the
problem. I have a number of servers running RedHat AS 2.1, RedHat AS
3, and Fedora with my hobbit server on Fedora Core 4. I built the
client on one AS 2.1 server, then created a tarball and copied all
files over to all other AS 2.1 servers. More than half work with no
problem, reporting memory, CPU, disk etc, but some don't report
anything. I stopped the client and removed all files, then rebuilt the
client using ./configure --client; make; make install  which worked
with no errors. I see no errors in my hobbit server logs, and I can
telnet from the clients to the server on port 1984 with no problem. 
The hobbit client seems to be running properly, and I don't see
anything unusual in the logs. 
# ps -elf | grep hobbit 040 S hobbit   25382     1  0  75   0    -   363 schedu Aug31 ?
 00:00:00 /home/hobbit/client/bin/hobbitlaunch
--config=/home/hobbit/client/etc/clientlaun 000 S hobbit   28365     1  0  85   5    -   561 wait4  08:37 ?
 00:00:00 sh -c vmstat 300 2
1>/home/hobbit/client/tmp/hobbit_vmstat.28352 2>&1; mv /home/ 000 S hobbit   28368 28365  0  82   5    -   363 schedu 08:37 ?
 00:00:00 vmstat 300 2 000 S root     28925 28788  0  76   0    -   436 pipe_w 08:41 pts/0
 00:00:00 grep hobbit 
# pwd /home/hobbit/client/logs 
# ls -al total 2 -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit        139 Aug 31 12:31
clientlaunch.log -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit          6 Aug 31 12:31
clientlaunch.pid -rw-rw-r--    1 hobbit   hobbit          0 Aug 31 12:31
hobbitclient.log 
# cat clientlaunch.log 2005-08-31 12:31:45 hobbitlaunch starting 2005-08-31 12:31:45 Loading tasklist configuration
from /home/hobbit/client/etc/clientlaunch.cfg