Newbie questions 🔗 link

First, I want to say-"wow".   I have been using BB for the better part
of the past 2 years, monitoring 124 hosts.    I always expounded upon
the virtues of BB.    

 
A few weeks ago at USENIX, I was introduced to HOBBIT- and I must admit,
I'm both thrilled and impressed.   The integrated RRD stuff is well, way
too cool for words, and more useful than you can imagine.     The
"sslcert" deal is also quite cool.   I like new toys.    Overall, the
new environment (compared to BB) is just much cleaner, and more
effective.    I appreciate all the work put into this. 

 
Even though I'm a (former!) BB user, I have a few questions to help me
along the way.........

 
1 - What is the best way to permanently disable a test for a particular
host?   I can't seem to figure out how to do this in bb-hosts or the
hobbit-clients.cfg file.   For example, in some operating systems (AIX,
for example), the messages (msgs) test will not work due to mucked up
permissions of the system messages/log file.   In these cases, I'd just
rather disable the test all together.     When formerly configured with
a BB client, the test shows up as disabled.   How to do this in HOBBIT?
(My goal, "all green"......)

 
2 - It would be super helpful if people could post samples of the hobbit
bb-hosts files here...     I am a bit overwhelmed by all of the
bbgen/display options, and am a bit confused as to how that all works.
Specifically, what I am interested in doing is grouping pages together
in different combinations.  For example, I have all of my "Sun" systems
in one group, all of my "terminal servers" in another group, etc.
With the newer page/subpage/etc functionality, I'd like to add multiple
groups that may include some of the same systems.   For example, in
addition to my "Sun", "HP", etc systems pages, I also want pages for
"Production Servers", "Development Servers", etc.     I am unclear on
how to do this without defining host entries multiple times (which, I am
assuming you want to avoid!).     Examples or whatever explanation can
be provided would be super helpful.

 
3 - Critical systems.   I am stumped, I cannot seem to get this to work,
despite following the documentation.    No matter what I do, all I get
is "All Monitored Systems OK", even though I've attempted adding
critical records via the GUI.     Am I missing something, or is this not
quite working in the current beta?

 
4 - messages/syslog click/download?   If I am in the messages screen, I
see (for example) the phrase "/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log" highlighted as
a clickable link.   But, if I click on it, my browser attempts to
download the file "bb-hostsvc.sh".       Is this a known issue?  Just
wondering.

 
Thanks for any help people can provide!   -kcb

 
Kent C. Brodie - user-da7f7d5174c0@xymon.invalid

Department of Physiology

Medical College of Wisconsin

(XXX) XXX-XXXX

Hi Kent,

thanks for the kind words - I'm glad you like Hobbit.

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 11:25:13AM -0500, Brodie, Kent wrote:

"Disable" has the special meaning of "making the status blue", but I 
get the impression that is not what you want - you'd like to remove it
altogether from the display.

The current release- and beta-versions will not let you do that, but
I've just committed a change so you can remove any of the columns from
the client-side tests through a new tag in the bb-hosts entry. E.g. if
you want to avoid having a "msgs" status for the host foo.bar.com, then
the entry in bb-hosts would be

   10.0.0.1 foo.bar.com  # NOCOLUMNS:msgs

You're not alone. The safe thing to do is to start out with the default
setup and just copy your bb-hosts file over from Big Brother - the
default setup should give you just about the same setup as you have in
BB. Then you can begin playing with all of the fancy new stuff.

I'd recommend settling down with a cup of coffee, and browse through
some of the man-pages. They're all available on-line through the "Help"
menu in your Hobbit installation, and they should cover all of the 
configuration files and tools.

Basically, you have two ways of doing that.

1) Add some extra pages to your normal Hobbit display. You just add them
   to the bb-hosts file and list the hosts you want on those pages, but
   instead of copying the entire configuration entry for a host, you
   just add it with an IP of "0.0.0.0" and a "noconn" tag. E.g.

       page sun Sun servers
       10.0.0.1  www.foo.com  # http://www.foo.com/
       10.0.0.2  dns.foo.com  # dns
       10.1.0.1  wwwtest.foo.com # http://wwwtest.foo.com/

       page prodservers Production systems
       0.0.0.0   www.foo.com  # noconn
       0.0.0.0   dns.foo.com  # noconn

       page testservers Test systems
       0.0.0.0   wwwtest.foo.com # noconn

   When a host is defined twice in the bb-hosts file like this, the
   second definition is merely a "place-holder" for the webpages. All
   of the network tests and the other definitions are taken from the
   primary definition.

   This gives you one set of webpages, with sub-pages for the various
   groupings you'd like.


2) If you want to isolate the groupings completely, then you can use
   the "Alternate pageset" method, where you generate multiple sets
   of webpages, with selected hosts going on different webpages.
   See the "Building alternate pagesets" description in the bbgen(1)
   man-page.

It should work in the current beta, but the documentation link from the
Help menu is missing the screenshots. They are included in the menu
on my site, at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/help/criticalsystems.html

Which browser are you using ? The link you're clicking sends back data
with a content-type of "text/plain" - some browsers (e.g. Konqueror
from the KDE project) will not display this inside the browser, but
prefers to download the file and bring up an external editor to display
it. It might be possible to alter this behaviour through a configuration
setting in your browser (in Konqueror, you do it via the Setup -> 
File associations menu - tell it to use the embedded viewer).


Regards,
Henrik

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

Henrik: will this allow removal of any column? Specifically "files" and "ports"?  Also, if you remove all references to a column for all hosts, will this also remove the column header, or will you just be left with an empty column with no dots?

-Charles

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 01:59:05PM -0700, Charles Jones wrote:

Not "any" column - just those that are generated form the client-side
tests. I.e. cpu, disk, memory, msgs, procs, files, ports.

It simply keeps those status-messages from being generated, so if you
remove e.g. the "files" column for all hosts, then there will not be a
"files" column on the display at all.

(I do plan to extend this so you can remove any column, and not just
those that stem from the client-side tests. But it required more changes
to the core utilities than I'm willing to do right now).


Regards,
Henrik

Henrik Stoerner wrote:

I see. I also just found the "--no-clear-files" option, which should 
effectively remove my files column :)

-Charles