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completely confused

20 messages in this thread

list Tim Rotunda · Sat, 5 Mar 2005 12:32:27 -0600 ·
Ok, maybe I have spent too much time looking at too many different man
pages for too many different products.  Whatever the case may be, I
could really use a cold slap in the face.

 
I want to monitor anything and everything I can on 100+ servers (numbers
growing monthly) all over the US.  Some are HP-UX, some are Linux, some
are Windows.  I am focused on HP-UX and Linux for now.  I would like to
use bb-central so that I do not have to deploy clients across my
enterprise, but I won't be so stubborn that I won't use bb-clients, as I
really need to have a hand full of remote servers monitored (cpu, disk
space, etc) by next Thursday.  I am trying to fend off a "wannabe"
administrator who is pushing Nagios, which I do not want to deploy.

 
Ok, here are the questions (please forgive my ignorance).....

 
-         It looks like I need to install Hobbit and BB-Client to
monitor the OS level on the Hobbit server.  True?

-         Can I "hobbit" enable my applications to report status from
remote servers without any middleware (bb-client)?

o       I would think this could be a "one liner" in my apps (20-30 of
them) to report their internal status.????

-         Where can I see the message format for sending my own messages
to the display server, if that is possible?

-         It looks like if I want to use bb-central:

o       Do I need both bb-server and bb client on the display server?

o       Should I modify bb-central to not use BB or maybe just rewrite
that functionality to fit hobbit?

 
Any advice, comments, suggestion welcome.

 
Thanks,

 
Tim Rotunda

I.T. & Systems Integration Manager

Opus Healthcare Solutions, Inc.

Austin, Texas  78759
list Henrik Størner · Sat, 5 Mar 2005 23:02:55 +0100 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 12:32:27PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Ok, maybe I have spent too much time looking at too many different man
pages for too many different products.  Whatever the case may be, I
could really use a cold slap in the face.
Well, it's pretty cold outside so if I stick my hand in the snow for a
couple of minutes, I'll try and provide what you're asking for :-)
quoted from Tim Rotunda

-         It looks like I need to install Hobbit and BB-Client to
monitor the OS level on the Hobbit server.  True?
Yes. I guess with "OS level" you mean stuff like disk utilisation, 
what the load is on the box, if processes are running and such.
You need something running on the box to get those data - that
"something" is the BB client.
quoted from Tim Rotunda

-         Can I "hobbit" enable my applications to report status from
remote servers without any middleware (bb-client)?

o       I would think this could be a "one liner" in my apps (20-30 of
them) to report their internal status.????
You can do that, and if you have the possibility of adding such a
"health check" function in your application, it is by far the best and
most rewarding way of monitoring application availability. Since the
application knows best what errors and problems can occur, it has the
option of checking for those - like if it needs a database connection,
it can check if there's a database available and responding by doing a
query on one of the tables. Or if some other ressource is needed, it
can check up on that.

There are (at least) two ways for an application to report its status
to Hobbit. 

One way is that the application periodically - on its own - sends in a
status report about its health; this means building a small status
message in the format

  status HOSTNAME.APPLICATIONNAME green 05 Mar 2005 22:51

  The FOO application is up and running

(If there's a problem, you can obviously make it yellow or red, and
include whatever troubleshooting information is relevant). After
building the message, either setup a tcp connection to the hobbit
server on port 1984 and just send this message across, or use the
"bb" client program which is included with Hobbit to handle the
details of getting the message across to the Hobbit server.


The other way of doing this is if your application is
web-enabled. Then you can let the application generate a dynamic
webpage with the status of the application, and just setup a network
test in Hobbit where you check the contents of that webpage to see if
everything is OK. One of my customers has done this with all of the
web-applications: The simply have a "checkOK" webpage that returns the
status of the application, and sets the background color of the
webpage to green if it is ok. So in Hobbit I just have a simple
webpage content check to request this page and look for a
"BGCOLOR=#00FF00" string which will be there if everything is OK. In
bb-hosts that is

  10.0.0.1   www.foo.com  # cont=myapp;http://www.foo.com/app;BGCOLOR=#00FF00

This generates a "myapp" column with the contents of the webpage - if
the BGCOLOR string is found then the status is green, otherwise it is
red.
quoted from Tim Rotunda

-         Where can I see the message format for sending my own messages
to the display server, if that is possible?
The "bb" manpage has a description of the messages you can send to
Hobbit.

-         It looks like if I want to use bb-central:
I'm not really qualified to answer questions on bb-central since I've
never used it. I am sure someone else can help you with this.


Regards,
Henrik
list Tim Rotunda · Tue, 8 Mar 2005 14:03:31 -0600 ·
Henrik,
Thanks for the info.  Very helpful indeed.

I have made much progress over the last few days.  My first install of
Hobbit was on Linux RH 7.3 and I had polluted the install with lots of
experimentation.  Anyway, I have abandoned that install and have
installed Hobbit server on HP-UX 11i v1.  Took some work to get rrdtool
and fping working, but looking back it wasn't too bad, and it runs very
well.

So just for clarification, before I start, I need to install the BB
Client for the OS level reporting to Hobbit.  This is not the Hobbit
Client and if not, what is the Hobbit Client for?

I have had success in Hobbit enabling one of my apps and it works very
well.  Only issue I see is that if the app takes a powder, Hobbit Server
needs to alert me quickly.  I am still looking for the "Time to Purple"
parameter.  Any help there would be great.  I am going into a meeting on
Friday and will propose that we "Hobbit Enable" 10 or so of our "key"
applications.  Our CEO has bought off on this and so it is just a matter
of getting engineering to buy into it as well.  This will enable our IT
staff to respond very quickly to application failure.

That will take care of about half of our remote monitoring needs.  As
for the other half, I am still looking to deploy BB-Central, but looking
at the scripts, it looks pretty tightly tied into BB so I am not sure
how successful I will be with that.  I will begin this task after I get
my Hobbit server reporting CPU, disk and such.

Thanks again for the info,
Best Regards,
Tim
quoted from Henrik Størner

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Saturday, March 05, 2005 4:03 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

On Sat, Mar 05, 2005 at 12:32:27PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Ok, maybe I have spent too much time looking at too many different man
pages for too many different products.  Whatever the case may be, I
could really use a cold slap in the face.
Well, it's pretty cold outside so if I stick my hand in the snow for a
couple of minutes, I'll try and provide what you're asking for :-)

-         It looks like I need to install Hobbit and BB-Client to
monitor the OS level on the Hobbit server.  True?
Yes. I guess with "OS level" you mean stuff like disk utilisation, 
what the load is on the box, if processes are running and such.
You need something running on the box to get those data - that
"something" is the BB client.

-         Can I "hobbit" enable my applications to report status from
remote servers without any middleware (bb-client)?

o       I would think this could be a "one liner" in my apps (20-30 of
them) to report their internal status.????
You can do that, and if you have the possibility of adding such a
"health check" function in your application, it is by far the best and
most rewarding way of monitoring application availability. Since the
application knows best what errors and problems can occur, it has the
option of checking for those - like if it needs a database connection,
it can check if there's a database available and responding by doing a
query on one of the tables. Or if some other ressource is needed, it
can check up on that.

There are (at least) two ways for an application to report its status
to Hobbit. 

One way is that the application periodically - on its own - sends in a
status report about its health; this means building a small status
message in the format

  status HOSTNAME.APPLICATIONNAME green 05 Mar 2005 22:51

  The FOO application is up and running

(If there's a problem, you can obviously make it yellow or red, and
include whatever troubleshooting information is relevant). After
building the message, either setup a tcp connection to the hobbit
server on port 1984 and just send this message across, or use the
"bb" client program which is included with Hobbit to handle the
details of getting the message across to the Hobbit server.


The other way of doing this is if your application is
web-enabled. Then you can let the application generate a dynamic
webpage with the status of the application, and just setup a network
test in Hobbit where you check the contents of that webpage to see if
everything is OK. One of my customers has done this with all of the
web-applications: The simply have a "checkOK" webpage that returns the
status of the application, and sets the background color of the
webpage to green if it is ok. So in Hobbit I just have a simple
webpage content check to request this page and look for a
"BGCOLOR=#00FF00" string which will be there if everything is OK. In
bb-hosts that is

  10.0.0.1   www.foo.com  #
cont=myapp;http://www.foo.com/app;BGCOLOR=#00FF00

This generates a "myapp" column with the contents of the webpage - if
the BGCOLOR string is found then the status is green, otherwise it is
red.

-         Where can I see the message format for sending my own
messages
to the display server, if that is possible?
The "bb" manpage has a description of the messages you can send to
Hobbit.

-         It looks like if I want to use bb-central:
I'm not really qualified to answer questions on bb-central since I've
never used it. I am sure someone else can help you with this.


Regards,
Henrik
list Henrik Størner · Tue, 8 Mar 2005 21:33:19 +0100 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 02:03:31PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
So just for clarification, before I start, I need to install the BB
Client for the OS level reporting to Hobbit.  This is not the Hobbit
Client and if not, what is the Hobbit Client for?
The Hobbit client is a replacement for the BB client; however, it is
still a very new piece of software, and currently supports only
OpenBSD.

It is obviously annoying that Hobbit relies on the BB client to do
some of the monitoring, but things take time ...
quoted from Tim Rotunda
I have had success in Hobbit enabling one of my apps and it works very
well.  Only issue I see is that if the app takes a powder, Hobbit Server
needs to alert me quickly.  I am still looking for the "Time to Purple"
parameter.
The way you control when the status goes purple is to set a lifetime
for the status when it is reported. Your application sends in a status
report that begins

   status www,foo,com.mytest green ....

This gets the default lifetime of 30 minutes - meaning that it will
stay green for 30 minutes, or until a new status update arrives. If
you want it to only stay green for e.g. 10 minutes, then send this
instead:

   status+10 www,foo,com.mytest green ....

The "+N" means that the status is valid for N minutes; after that it
goes purple. It is normally used to prolong the lifetime of a status
report, but you can shorten it as well.
quoted from Tim Rotunda
 Any help there would be great.  I am going into a meeting on
Friday and will propose that we "Hobbit Enable" 10 or so of our "key"
applications.  Our CEO has bought off on this and so it is just a matter
of getting engineering to buy into it as well.  This will enable our IT
staff to respond very quickly to application failure.
Sounds great :-)
quoted from Tim Rotunda
That will take care of about half of our remote monitoring needs.  As
for the other half, I am still looking to deploy BB-Central, but looking
at the scripts, it looks pretty tightly tied into BB so I am not sure
how successful I will be with that.  I will begin this task after I get
my Hobbit server reporting CPU, disk and such.
Let us know what problems you run into.


Regards,
Henrik
list Tim Rotunda · Tue, 8 Mar 2005 15:04:29 -0600 ·
Well I guess I could port HobbitClient to HP-UX.  I will have to noodle
on that for awhile.  I have tried to make it on 11i already and ran into
two issues.  First I don't have err.h on my system and when I change
err.h to errno.h I get this make error which I have no clue as to why:
root at dev6:/var/tmp/hobbitclient-0.3 $gmake
bison -y -p`echo conf_parse.c|sed 's/^\([^_]\{1,\}_\).*$/\1/'`
conf_parse.y
gmake: *** [conf_parse.c] Error 141

I will make the assumption here that BB1.9e will work for my needs here
if I decide not to make the port?

This status lifetime parameter is very cool.  I will add that now.

Thanks again for the info,
quoted from Henrik Størner
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 2:33 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

On Tue, Mar 08, 2005 at 02:03:31PM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
So just for clarification, before I start, I need to install the BB
Client for the OS level reporting to Hobbit.  This is not the Hobbit
Client and if not, what is the Hobbit Client for?
The Hobbit client is a replacement for the BB client; however, it is
still a very new piece of software, and currently supports only
OpenBSD.

It is obviously annoying that Hobbit relies on the BB client to do
some of the monitoring, but things take time ...
I have had success in Hobbit enabling one of my apps and it works very
well.  Only issue I see is that if the app takes a powder, Hobbit
Server
needs to alert me quickly.  I am still looking for the "Time to
Purple"
parameter.
The way you control when the status goes purple is to set a lifetime
for the status when it is reported. Your application sends in a status
report that begins

   status www,foo,com.mytest green ....

This gets the default lifetime of 30 minutes - meaning that it will
stay green for 30 minutes, or until a new status update arrives. If
you want it to only stay green for e.g. 10 minutes, then send this
instead:

   status+10 www,foo,com.mytest green ....

The "+N" means that the status is valid for N minutes; after that it
goes purple. It is normally used to prolong the lifetime of a status
report, but you can shorten it as well.
 Any help there would be great.  I am going into a meeting on
Friday and will propose that we "Hobbit Enable" 10 or so of our "key"
applications.  Our CEO has bought off on this and so it is just a
matter
of getting engineering to buy into it as well.  This will enable our
IT
staff to respond very quickly to application failure.
Sounds great :-)
That will take care of about half of our remote monitoring needs.  As
for the other half, I am still looking to deploy BB-Central, but
looking
at the scripts, it looks pretty tightly tied into BB so I am not sure
how successful I will be with that.  I will begin this task after I
get
my Hobbit server reporting CPU, disk and such.
Let us know what problems you run into.


Regards,
Henrik
list Tom Georgoulias · Wed, 09 Mar 2005 08:06:28 -0500 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
Tim Rotunda wrote:
I will make the assumption here that BB1.9e will work for my needs here
if I decide not to make the port?
You are correct, the client bb 1.9e will do client OS monitoring  for parameters like CPU load average, disk utilization, processes, and a couple others.  You can add even more functional tests by using add-on scripts from deadcat.net to collect data for in areas like vmstat, memory, etc.

Tom
list Lars Ebeling · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 14:43:34 +0100 (CET) ·
Hello Tom,
 So you were into my small homenetwork looking. It's fun to know who were there. (gw2-outside-fe.nandomedia.com)
 /Lars
Hobbithobbyist


Tom Georgoulias <user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid> wrote:

Från: Tom Georgoulias[SMTP:user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid]
Skickat: den 9 mars 2005 14:06:28
Till: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Ämne: Re: [hobbit] completely confused
Automatiskt vidarebefordrat av en regel
quoted from Tim Rotunda
Tim Rotunda wrote:
I will make the assumption here that BB1.9e will work for my needs here
if I decide not to make the port?
You are correct, the client bb 1.9e will do client OS monitoring for parameters like CPU load average, disk utilization, processes, and a couple others. You can add even more functional tests by using add-on scripts from deadcat.net to collect data for in areas like vmstat, memory, etc.

Tom


I'm not young enough to know everything.
-Oscar Wilde
list Tom Georgoulias · Wed, 09 Mar 2005 08:56:06 -0500 ·
quoted from Lars Ebeling
lars ebeling wrote:
Hello Tom,
 So you were into my small homenetwork looking. It's fun to know who were there. (gw2-outside-fe.nandomedia.com)
Yup, that was me.  I saw your question on the list and wondered what you were seeing.  I expect you will see many others checking out your hobbit systems in the future, once the email message is archived and others stumble across the URL for one reason or another.

Tom
list Lars Ebeling · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 14:59:56 +0100 (CET) ·
Well it's normally not open, but since I wrote the URL I had to open.
quoted from Tom Georgoulias

Tom Georgoulias <user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid> wrote:
Från: Tom Georgoulias[SMTP:user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid]
Skickat: den 9 mars 2005 14:56:06
Till: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Ämne: Re: [hobbit] completely confused
Automatiskt vidarebefordrat av en regel
lars ebeling wrote:
Hello Tom,
So you were into my small homenetwork looking. It's fun to know who were there. (gw2-outside-fe.nandomedia.com)
Yup, that was me. I saw your question on the list and wondered what you were seeing. I expect you will see many others checking out your hobbit systems in the future, once the email message is archived and others stumble across the URL for one reason or another.

Tom


I'm not young enough to know everything.
-Oscar Wilde
list Tim Rotunda · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 10:52:27 -0600 ·
Tom,
Thanks for the confirmation.  It indeed does work.  I installed BB1.9e
on my Hobbit server and am getting the info I wanted.

Now the $64k question is can I get BB-Central to work with my Hobbit
Server/BB1.9 Client install.  I fear I need to have BB-Server running,
but we shall see unless someone can spare me the pain of learning this
on my own.
Thanks,
Tim
quoted from Tom Georgoulias

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Georgoulias [mailto:user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid] Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 7:06 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

Tim Rotunda wrote:
I will make the assumption here that BB1.9e will work for my needs
here
if I decide not to make the port?
You are correct, the client bb 1.9e will do client OS monitoring  for parameters like CPU load average, disk utilization, processes, and a couple others.  You can add even more functional tests by using add-on scripts from deadcat.net to collect data for in areas like vmstat, memory, etc.

Tom
list Tom Georgoulias · Wed, 09 Mar 2005 12:51:52 -0500 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
Tim Rotunda wrote:
Now the $64k question is can I get BB-Central to work with my Hobbit
Server/BB1.9 Client install.  I fear I need to have BB-Server running,
but we shall see unless someone can spare me the pain of learning this
on my own.
I think a bunch of us were hoping to learn from you.  ;)

Tom
list Tim Rotunda · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 12:01:37 -0600 ·
Well aright then.  Here goes...........
quoted from Tom Georgoulias

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Georgoulias [mailto:user-5f0deb12906c@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 11:52 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

Tim Rotunda wrote:
Now the $64k question is can I get BB-Central to work with my Hobbit
Server/BB1.9 Client install.  I fear I need to have BB-Server running,
but we shall see unless someone can spare me the pain of learning this
on my own.
I think a bunch of us were hoping to learn from you.  ;)

Tom
list Henrik Størner · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 21:46:32 +0100 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:52:27AM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Now the $64k question is can I get BB-Central to work with my Hobbit
Server/BB1.9 Client install.  I fear I need to have BB-Server running,
but we shall see unless someone can spare me the pain of learning this
on my own.
I've had a look at bb-central today, and it doesn't seem terribly
difficult to make it work with Hobbit.

There are two issues that I've found so far. 

1) bb-central reads the bbsys.sh and bbdef.sh files from BB to pick up
   the locations of various tools. This is easily handled by having it
   read hobbitserver.cfg instead - either change bb-central files to
   read that file, or setup a symlink from bbdef.sh and bbsys.sh to
   hobbitserver.cfg.

2) bb-central uses the "bbnet" utility from BB to check if a server is
   up before it starts connecting to it with ssh. There is no bbnet
   utility included with Hobbit, so some replacement for that must be
   found.

Other than that, it seems that bb-central uses the normal "bb" tool to
send in status reports for the hosts it monitors, and that should work
without any problems.

I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can get it running. I
think I may have to setup a page on how to port popular BB server-side
extensions to Hobbit - bb-central could be the first item on that
page.


Regards,
Henrik
list Henrik Størner · Wed, 9 Mar 2005 23:13:29 +0100 ·
On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 09:46:32PM +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
[about BB-central]
I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can get it running.
Well, this one has me stumped.

Getting it to run was pretty easy, but it appears to be rather
broken.

The main script bb-central.pl generates bb-central.sh, which has the
commands needed to login to a remote system via ssh and retrieve data.
The only problem is that it generates an ssh command that just logs
in; then it sits there in an interactive session and does nothing.

As far as I can see, the perl-script should add the commands needed to
collect the data, but it doesn't. I even tried setting it up to run
under a BB client, and it gives me the same problem.

I think I'll post to the BB list and see if the author has some idea
about what's going on.


Henrik
list Tim Rotunda · Thu, 10 Mar 2005 16:03:31 -0600 ·
Henrik,
I have bb-central loaded but I can't get it to .def file to build unless
I manually run bb-central.sh.  Now I have to comment out the call to
bbnet, and insert a command I want to run between the quotes on the ssh
line.  Then it dumps the output from my ssh into bb-central.dat in the
tmp dir.

So after jacking with this most of my day, I decided to just run bb with
what looks like the data that the bb-xxxx.pl scripts are trying to send
and viola, I get something.  That seemed way to easy and tells me I need
to be pulling metrics and feeding them using my own code.  I am just not
real clear on how I feed data into hobbit and get the graphing too.
Where can I see details of the format for sending data into Hobbit.  I
used bb to send data into hobbit and it brought up a graph when I
drilled into that metric, unlike sending it from my own code via the
IP:PORT from a remote system.

Did that make any sense?
Thanks for any help.
quoted from Henrik Størner
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:13 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 09:46:32PM +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
[about BB-central]
I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can get it running.
Well, this one has me stumped.

Getting it to run was pretty easy, but it appears to be rather
broken.

The main script bb-central.pl generates bb-central.sh, which has the
commands needed to login to a remote system via ssh and retrieve data.
The only problem is that it generates an ssh command that just logs
in; then it sits there in an interactive session and does nothing.

As far as I can see, the perl-script should add the commands needed to
collect the data, but it doesn't. I even tried setting it up to run
under a BB client, and it gives me the same problem.

I think I'll post to the BB list and see if the author has some idea
about what's going on.


Henrik
list Daniel J McDonald · Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:35:02 -0600 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
On Thu, 2005-03-10 at 16:03 -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Henrik,
I have bb-central loaded but I can't get it to .def file to build unless
I manually run bb-central.sh.  Now I have to comment out the call to
bbnet, and insert a command I want to run between the quotes on the ssh
line.  Then it dumps the output from my ssh into bb-central.dat in the
tmp dir.
You should be able to change bbcentral.def to reflect hobbit, then add
an entry like this to hobbitlaunch.cfg:

[bbcentral]
        ENVFILE /var/hobbit/server/ext/bbcentral/bbcentral.def
        NEEDS hobbitd
        CMD $BBHOME/ext/bbcentral/bb-central.sh
        LOGFILE $BBSERVERLOGS/bbcentral.log
        INTERVAL 5m


-- 
Daniel J McDonald, CCIE # 2495, CNX
Austin Energy

user-290ce4e24e19@xymon.invalid
list Tim Rotunda · Sun, 13 Mar 2005 09:52:45 -0600 ·
Ok, so I got everything "hobbitlaunching" and now ready to tackle the
bbnet issue.

Yesterday I wrote a small C prog to make a connection with hobbitd, bump
a given file into hobbit and disconnect.  Is that what bbnet is doing
here?

If so, how do I feed hobbit graphing parameters?  I am getting the
status, setting color and a bdf, for instance, but I can't figure out
how to feed hobbit parms to graph.

Again, any help certainly appreciated.
quoted from Henrik Størner
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 2:47 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 10:52:27AM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Now the $64k question is can I get BB-Central to work with my Hobbit
Server/BB1.9 Client install.  I fear I need to have BB-Server running,
but we shall see unless someone can spare me the pain of learning this
on my own.
I've had a look at bb-central today, and it doesn't seem terribly
difficult to make it work with Hobbit.

There are two issues that I've found so far. 

1) bb-central reads the bbsys.sh and bbdef.sh files from BB to pick up
   the locations of various tools. This is easily handled by having it
   read hobbitserver.cfg instead - either change bb-central files to
   read that file, or setup a symlink from bbdef.sh and bbsys.sh to
   hobbitserver.cfg.

2) bb-central uses the "bbnet" utility from BB to check if a server is
   up before it starts connecting to it with ssh. There is no bbnet
   utility included with Hobbit, so some replacement for that must be
   found.

Other than that, it seems that bb-central uses the normal "bb" tool to
send in status reports for the hosts it monitors, and that should work
without any problems.

I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can get it running. I
think I may have to setup a page on how to port popular BB server-side
extensions to Hobbit - bb-central could be the first item on that
page.


Regards,
Henrik
list Henrik Størner · Sun, 13 Mar 2005 18:41:07 +0100 ·
quoted from Tim Rotunda
On Sun, Mar 13, 2005 at 09:52:45AM -0600, Tim Rotunda wrote:
Yesterday I wrote a small C prog to make a connection with hobbitd, bump
a given file into hobbit and disconnect.  Is that what bbnet is doing
here?
No, bbnet is the Big Brother tool that performs network
tests. BB-Central uses it to check if the SSH daemon on each server is
running, so as to avoid trying to connect to ssh on a server that is
down.
quoted from Tim Rotunda
If so, how do I feed hobbit graphing parameters?  I am getting the
status, setting color and a bdf, for instance, but I can't figure out
how to feed hobbit parms to graph.
For the standard tests (cpu, disk, memory, network) you shouldn't need
to do anything. As soon as you send those data to Hobbit, they get
graphed.


Henrik
list Tim Rotunda · Mon, 14 Mar 2005 14:03:42 -0600 ·
I give up.  I am going mad trying to hobbitize BB-Central.  Too
complicated for a non-author to rewrite without more details.  Sorry for
those who were looking forward to BB-Central-For-Hobbit version 1.0.

Instead of rewriting something I didn't write, don't know, requires BB
Client, and think is way to complicated for my feeble brain, I have
created HobbitCentral Version 0.1a.  In its very early state, it
consists of a C program called ipxfer, a script called hobcen.sh, a
config file called hobcen.cfg and a data file called xfer.dat.

I am deploying initially to my remote HP-UX servers and will figure out
how to release the HP-UX version when I am satisfied that it works well
enough for an initial release.  I have only written free software for
the FlightSim community so I will have to learn how to do it for the
real world.

I will tweak it for Linux after I have released the HP version.

Updates as they become available.
quoted from Tim Rotunda
Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 4:13 PM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] completely confused

On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 09:46:32PM +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:
[about BB-central]
I'll play around with it a bit more and see if I can get it running.
Well, this one has me stumped.

Getting it to run was pretty easy, but it appears to be rather
broken.

The main script bb-central.pl generates bb-central.sh, which has the
commands needed to login to a remote system via ssh and retrieve data.
The only problem is that it generates an ssh command that just logs
in; then it sits there in an interactive session and does nothing.

As far as I can see, the perl-script should add the commands needed to
collect the data, but it doesn't. I even tried setting it up to run
under a BB client, and it gives me the same problem.

I think I'll post to the BB list and see if the author has some idea
about what's going on.


Henrik
list Olivier Beau · Fri, 25 Mar 2005 01:40:49 +0100 ·
when i do a search using bb-findhost.sh,
i only get one link per host, (i have hosts on several pages..)

i remember you added this feature on bbgen 3.3 :
* bb-findhost will now show all of the pages where the host
  exists, instead of just the primary one. Suggested by
  Thomas Schaefer.


olivier