bbwin 0.10 available 🔗 link

Hello,

After more than a year without new release, I publish today BBWin
0.10. This is the new stuffs I put in it:

BBWin 0.10 Preview version -  December 30th 2007

+New Features

** Centralized mode for agents cpu, disk, memory, msgs, netstat,
ports, procs, timediff, uptime
** Centralized mode graphing network traffic
** See the bbWin webpage for instructions http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/

* Msgs agent reports parts of description events when the message file
contening the
  static string can't be found. It will reports as the Windows Event
Viewer, just like this :
  "The description for Event ID ( XXX ) in Source ( XXX ) cannot be found.
  The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message
  DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use
  the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and
Support for details.
  The following information is part of the event: XXXXX, XXXXX."
* You can use environment variables in the bbwinupdate agent. Example :
  <setting name="filename" value="bbwin\%COMPUTERNAME%.cfg" />
* svcs services rules can be used with comments
* disk agent can monitor free space from XX-rom drive and not only if
a media is inserted.
             (feature requested to monitor dvd-ram burning state)
* disk agent can monitor volume mount points
* Proxy access : BBWin can access to your hobbit server through a
proxy (http proxy)
  You can specify a user/password if you use http proxy basic authentication.
* disk agent will alert you if a disk monitored with a custum rule
disappear from the Server.
  (Example : external usb harddrive turned off)
* uptime agent : add max delay option to get alerts when servers are
up for a too long time
* who agent : report current connected users on the servers

Here the link for the download :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbwin

About the centralized mode, to handle it with bbwin, you have to use a
patch for hobbit 4.2 or for the future 4.3, it is available on
http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/
The centralized mode for BBWin in hobbit sources has been developed by
François Lacroix, one of the new developper of devmon. Big thanks to
him. Even if we tested on our servers, it may contains bugs so you
should test it not on productions servers for the moment. You can
report bugs on the bbwin or hobbit mailing list so we can improve the
solution. We hope to have something enough good to be included in
hobbit 4.3 and will continue to update the patch for hobbit 4.2.
The client-local.cfg is not supported for the moment. It is the next
step (files, dir, logs, clientupdate).

I have also some general questions about bbwin  :

Actually, svcs only works as a local agent because there is no option
for it in hobbit-clients.cfg, it is very specific to Windows world.
What do you prefer ?

-	we keep svcs agent with local configuration. BBWin can handle
centralized mode with agents which will run with local configuration
-	we create a new option for the hobbit-clients.cfg which will be only
used for Windows client
-	May be you have other good ideas about that problem. At this time,
it is only about svcs agent but for advanced features in the future,
we will have other choices to make.

With the centralized mode, you will see that you get graphs for each
of your networks connections. However, for Windows, the names are too
long compared to the unix name (eth0, eri0..). So, at this time, I use
the mac address of the network card for the graph name. Would you
prefer to use the name by making a very short name ? the ip address ?
or is the mac address fine ?

There is a new agent 'who' used to report current connected users on
the windows servers. There is no alert for it at this time. Which
relevant type of alerts could be useful ? there is no alert options on
Unix side. I was thinking of a rule like PROC but called USER with a
minimum logged number and a maximum logged number for a username.

For 2008, I will do my best to create more releases. 2007 was not a
good year :-) The first goal will be to finalize the centralized mode
with all the unix options. I now use the sourceforge subversion
repository so you will always get the lastest sources of BBWin.

As usual, let me know if you get troubles with this new version.

Happy new year for all the hobbit community :-)


Etienne.

On Dec 30, 2007 12:42 AM, Etienne Grignon <user-87c74c1037a4@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Neat, thanks.

BBWin 0.10 Preview version -  December 30th 2007
<---SNIP--->
* who agent : report current connected users on the servers
<---SNIP--->

I could see it being useful to alert on things like:

* Any user is logged in more than once
* Specific users are logged in (such as where nobody should use the
Administrator account)
* Users are logged in outside/during certain hours

For each I can see it being handy to define the groups either by
inclusion (any member of "Domain Users") or exclusion (anybody except
members of "Domain Administrators"), and sometimes both (any member of
"Domain Users", except for members of "Management" or the user
"Smith").

-- 
                 Please keep list traffic on the list.

Rob MacGregor
      Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he
        doesn't become a monster.                  Friedrich Nietzsche

Those are some impressive improvements!  Great job!

Now if I had any Windows servers... :)

On 12/30/07, Rob MacGregor <user-07c9d92ae079@xymon.invalid> wrote:

-- 

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

I am very happy to hear this, and even more so that BBWin now supports
a centralized configuration.

Etienne writes:

My preferred solution would be to have it in the hobbit-clients.cfg
file, so there is a specific configuration statement for the Windows
services check. There are a lot of Windows boxes being monitored with
Hobbit, and I very much consider BBWin an essential companion to Hobbit.
So the configuration should be as Hobbit-like as possible, even if it
means implementing bits of code in Hobbit that are specific to BBWin.

There's really two sides to this issue. One thing is to identify the
network interface from one poll to the next, so we put the right data
into the RRD files - for this we can use any identifier that is
guaranteed to be a)unique and b)permanent. Another thing is to present
the interface name in some sensible way on the graph.

I don't really like using the MAC address, because it is difficult to
relate to anything meaningful - I wouldn't know that my primary
interface is 00:0E:A6:CE:D6:85, but I do know it's called "eth0".
I've had the same problem for the SNMP data collection, so I have come
up with an "rrd.meta" file that can map the ID of the network interface
into a text that appears on the graph. The code isn't pretty, and it is 
static data that must be maintained by hand - if anyone has a better 
suggestion, please speak up.

Would make sense, also as a check on the unix systems.

For 2008, I will do my best to create more releases. 

Me too :-)


Regards,
Henrik

Henrik Stoerner <mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid> wrote:

The default name of an ethernet network connection on Windows is 'Local Area
Connection' with ' #1', etc. when there is more than one. Is that too long?
If so, it is extremely easy to rename the network connection within Windows
to something shorter e.g. LAN1, LAN2, etc. or whatever one wants. It seems
to me that using this name would be most appropriate, since it would be
guaranteed to correspond to what is visible in the machine 'Network
Connections' GUI, or am I missing something? Obviously, as Henrik implies,
the actual data will need to be associated with the MAC address, so that
renaming the NIC wouldn't screw up historical data.

Kind regards,

Sebastian

Sebastian <mailto:user-7b2156f36779@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Actually, thinking more about this, one would probably not want to use the
MAC address, since one might change a given NIC from being on one network to
being on another network while remaining in the same machine. At the same
time, one could easily rename the NIC in Windows to show the change, but
obviously one can't change the MAC address. It would be better for the data
before and after the change of network (i.e. change of name) to be separate
since there is no real relation between the two, other than the fact that
they used the same hardware. Network connection names are guaranteed to be
unique in Windows (XP at least).

Kind regards,

Sebastian

On Sunday 30 December 2007, Etienne Grignon wrote:

I have a request for change.
Is it possible to add an option to bbwincmd so you can specify a file with the message that needs to be send.

We use the hobbit client and server to send extra information.  The message is too big to specify on the command line.  We changed the source so -f can be used to specify a file.  Setting up the the environment to compile is more work then changing the source ;)


Stef