Comments wanted - OK to drop BB support in Hobbit ? 🔗 link

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 11:29:58AM +0200, Frédéric Mangeant wrote:

BTW, I expect to release a 4.0.3 version over the week-end with

Do you also plan to release some day bbgen 3.6 (bbgen 3.5 with the 5
patches available here : http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/bbgen/) ?

This brings up a slighty bigger issue.

Since Hobbit grew out of the Big Brother environment, it is still
possible to configure Hobbit for use with BB - it is in essence a
"bbgen 4.0".

I would like to drop that, since it does make things more difficult
for future developments, and I honestly haven't done any testing
against BB for some months now. Right now the development focus for
Hobbit is the "behind-the-scenes" server functions, but should the
focus at some point go towards new features in the user-interface part
of Hobbit, it would be difficult to stay backwards compatible with Big
Brother in the sense that you can run e.g. the Hobbit version of bbgen
on top of Big Brother.

So what do you say - can I drop the BB support and focus entirely on
a pure Hobbit environment?

It's still something I decide, but I would appreciate your input. If I
do decide to drop BB support in Hobbit, I will wrap it up with a bbgen
3.6 release to close that down nicely.


Regards,
Henrik

Since there is no development effort on BB since a  very long time,
and because of the license problem (BB = BTF and Hobbit = GPL),
i would suggest to drop BB support and focus on pure Hobbit.


Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Uwe Kirbach

--
Uwe Kirbach
EnBW Service GmbH
Betrieb Enterprise Systeme und Infrastruktur
Systemmanagement Unix

Durlacher Allee 93
76131 Karlsruhe

Tel: +XX (X)XXX-XX-XXXXX

The BB agents will still work, right?  We have a lot of already-paid-for agents running around out there.  Other than that and the bbmrtg.sh script, I don't use anything from BB anymore.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2005 6:21 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: [hobbit] Comments wanted - OK to drop BB support in Hobbit ?

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 11:29:58AM +0200, Frédéric Mangeant wrote:

This brings up a slighty bigger issue.

Since Hobbit grew out of the Big Brother environment, it is still
possible to configure Hobbit for use with BB - it is in essence a
"bbgen 4.0".

I would like to drop that, since it does make things more difficult
for future developments, and I honestly haven't done any testing
against BB for some months now. Right now the development focus for
Hobbit is the "behind-the-scenes" server functions, but should the
focus at some point go towards new features in the user-interface part
of Hobbit, it would be difficult to stay backwards compatible with Big
Brother in the sense that you can run e.g. the Hobbit version of bbgen
on top of Big Brother.

So what do you say - can I drop the BB support and focus entirely on
a pure Hobbit environment?

It's still something I decide, but I would appreciate your input. If I
do decide to drop BB support in Hobbit, I will wrap it up with a bbgen
3.6 release to close that down nicely.


Regards,
Henrik

user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid 04/21/05 7:20 AM >>>

Henrik,

As someone who uses BB and has never gotten bbgen to work right, but does have Hobbit working, I'd say jettison the project from any BB connections.  
There are a few immediate benefits I can see growing out of this.

1.  A true database backend.  Trying to tie the legacy BB stuff into it would be more difficult than just doing your own efforts.

2. Better notification/escalation support.  One of my biggest issues with BB is this piece.  There is largely no way to send a new notification (I use traps, no paging) when the status goes from yellow to red, or red back to yellow.

3.  More colors would be easier.  yellow/red for problems is almost not enough.  
4.  A real event list.  Having the last 25 events in a web page is ok, but being able to have a sortable list of events based on severity (plus some other issues), would be much nicer.

There's my opinion.  Like you said, it's ultimately up to you.
It doesn't seem like the BB guys had any problems with going commercial, you shouldn't have any issues going it on your own.  
Paul

On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 13:20 +0200, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Well, I don't see any problem with this, but I would like to see
bbclient compatibility remain. I don't think hobbit yet has the right
amount of client tests to be able to ignore what BB has. ie, even just
the standard BB client works better than the current hobbit version (not
that I've tried it, since you keep telling us it doesn't work)... but
add to that all the stuff on www.deadcat.net, and, well... you know,
thats a lot to try and replicate...

That'd be nice :)

To be honest, I wonder if the quest version of BB is actually
selling/successful... ie, are there still loads of new BB users
sprouting up, or is it just old BTF license users who are
using/maintaining old BB installations.... We haven't seen any BTF
releases, and I've not seen anything anywhere to indicate that there
have been any commercial updates/changes either.

Regards,
Adam

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 01:20:46PM, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Absolutely. It will give you some time to work on a BB client
replacement as well :-)

Thanks

-- 
Asif Iqbal
PGP Key: 0xE62693C5 KeyServer: pgp.mit.edu
"..there are two kinds of people: those who work and those who take the credit...try
 to be in the first group;...less competition there."  - Indira Gandhi

Henrik Stoerner schrieb:

Yes, I don't need the BB support.

Best wishes,
Dirk

I think that the ability to run with BB as "bbgen 4.0" should be dropped, in
order to provide a full GPL monitoring system.

I was asking for a 3.6 release of bbgen because of some BB servers that I
won't be able to move to Hobbit soon :-(

-- 

Frédéric Mangeant

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

As long as you mean BB only on the server side (bbgen), not breaking 
compatibility with the BB client, I'm fine with that decision.

Tom

Henrik Stoerner schrieb:

Drop it, as long as the bbclient still works. For all deadcat-scripts, you can use the bbclient on the same host as hobbit, but the messages must be recordnize by hobbit, because without that, hobbit is only a network-tool, not a real system-monitoring tool.
I think, you habe the idea about config and status in mysql etc. That would be great.

Thomas

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

So what do you say - can I drop the BB support and focus entirely on
a pure Hobbit environment?

I agree with everybody that want compatibilty with the BB-client.

 
Regards

Lars


Hobbithobbyist

"If you run UNIX and you don't have a UPS, you should see a psychiatrist...."
--Byte Magazine (years ago)

On 4/21/05, Tom Georgoulias <user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Ditto...  

-- 
--==[ Bob Gordon ]==--

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 01:20:46PM +0200, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

So far the consensus appears to be that it would be OK, as long as
Hobbit stays compatible with the BB clients and Deadcat extensions -
and that has always been my intention. Hobbit recognizes all of the
messages that a BB client sends, and it will continue to do so.


Thanks!

Henrik