resolver failures 🔗 link

I am seeing intermittent resolver failures
in /var/log/hobbit/bb-network.log.

This box also runs MRTG, which chews up a lot of resources with as many
points as I monitor.  The failures appear to occur one minute and 3-10
seconds into the MRTG polling cycle, during which time the box is CPU
bound for about 30 seconds (decrypting several thousand SNMP V3 PDU's)

Is there a way to extend the ares resolver timeout?  Or is there some
local resolver caching I could set up to help mitigate this problem?

At any other point in the MRTG polling cycle the resolver seems to work
fine.  The other pieces cause the system to be network bound during the
initial poll (about 25 seconds), and disk bound (40 seconds) whilst
re-writing the ~6000 RRD files.

-- 
Daniel J McDonald, CCIE # 2495, CISSP # 78281, CNX
Austin Energy
http://www.austinenergy.com

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 06:40:58AM -0600, Daniel J McDonald wrote:

"--dns-timeout=N" (default: 30 seconds) for the bbtest-net program.

A local caching DNS server on the Hobbit box doing network tests is always 
a good idea.

So another solution might be to make sure that the MRTG update and the
Hobbit network tests do not run at the same time. You can do that if you
run the mrtg update from hobbitlaunch instead of through cron; the GROUP
keyword for each section in hobbitlaunch.cfg is used to make sure there
is only one task belonging to each GROUP running at the same time.


Regards,
Henrik

port 1984 bb message protocol, log format are all originated and designed by Quest' BB program.
Will hobbit client/server  in legal problem later on if Quest decide to enforce per-seat license policy ?

Thanks for your comments


T.J. Yang

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On Wednesday 29 November 2006 14:50, T.J. Yang wrote:

No.  And even with a yes, all this is easy changed.


Stef

If it copied the code yes but the port wouldn't matter and formatting of
the logs wouldn't either, since they are both fairly abstract principles
- you can't sue people for connecting to the same port your program uses
or the was they chose to make something look, only if they used your
code to do it without authorisation.

Jason.

-----Original Message-----
From: Stef Coene [mailto:user-dbffe946c0f4@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: 29 November 2006 14:13
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: Re: [hobbit] Will hobbit infringe patent/copyright of Quest's
bb ?

On Wednesday 29 November 2006 14:50, T.J. Yang wrote:

No.  And even with a yes, all this is easy changed.


Stef

Didn't they submit an RFC for the protocol?  That would make it
available for anyone to use.  A pure Hobbit implementation would not be
subject to any Quest decisions.  But if you are mixing BB and Hobbit
components, then you will have to honor any BB license restrictions.

Of course, I am not a lawyer, and so this viewpoint is based on what
sounds reasonable to me, not necessarily on what might get decided in a
court.  And we all know how courts can sometimes interpret things in a
way that is not obvious to most folks.

GLH 

-----Original Message-----
From: T.J. Yang [mailto:user-8e841282cda5@xymon.invalid] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 7:50 AM
To: user-ae9b8668bcde@xymon.invalid
Subject: [hobbit] Will hobbit infringe patent/copyright of Quest's bb ?


port 1984 bb message protocol, log format are all originated and
designed by Quest' BB program.
Will hobbit client/server  in legal problem later on if Quest decide to
enforce per-seat license policy ?

Thanks for your comments


T.J. Yang

Stay up-to-date with your friends through the Windows Live Spaces
friends list. 

http://clk.atdmt.com/MSN/go/msnnkwsp0070000001msn/direct/01/?href=http:/
/spaces.live.com/spacesapi.aspx?wx_action=create&wx_url=/friends.aspx&mk

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 07:50:16AM -0600, T.J. Yang wrote:

I don't think there will be a problem. I am not a lawyer, but here's how
I see it:

If Quest were to claim any ownership of the BB procotol or file formats, it 
would have to be based on either a) trade secret, b) patent, or c) copyright.

a) fails because the BB folks published the protocol for anyone to use;
   it is documented in the BB on-line help, which is freely accessible
   for download.

b) fails since AFAIK the communications protocol has not been patented.

c) fails both because Hobbit doesn't use any code from BB, and because
   copyright does not restrict interoperability and reverse-engineering
   work. E.g. that is how the Samba team have been able to implement
   a MS Windows fileserver on Linux without getting into legal problems 
   with Microsoft.

Besides, Hobbit actually uses a very extended version of the BB
protocol. I currently regard the BB protocol as a "legacy" compatibility
thing only; all of the communication between Hobbit modules already use
a different protocol (eg the client->server communication), or will do
so within a very short time (the only thing left using standard BB
protocol is how the network test results are sent to the Hobbit server,
and that will change over the next year).


On a broader scale: I've had this question asked privately a couple of
times since Hobbit was first released. I know that Quest is aware of
the Hobbit project; I also know that until now they haven't in any way
contacted me regarding any kind of "intellectual property" issue. Hobbit
has been around for 2 years, so if they had any problems with this I 
think I would have heard from them by now.


Regards,
Henrik

I really appreciate Henrik and others' reply regarding to my post.
the analysis of this potential legal issue is good.
I will forward the posts to my management for their own interpretation.

Regards

tj

Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 18:45:51 +0100

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http://ideas.live.com

This is another question I will be asked.

Is hobbit development a one-person project or there are many people contributing on the development of this project ?

Browsing from the source code I see names beside Henrik. I am having problem to prepare
the answer for this question.

So far, I am thinking to a grep on string with email patten to get a feel how many people contributed.


T.J. Yang

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I did a find+grep for email address  and adding names from Credit file in source.

I found there are 51 persons contribute to this project.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/System_Monitoring_with_Hobbit/Developer_Guide#Developer_Who_is_who

T.J. Yang

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On Wed, 2006-11-29 at 13:51 +0100, Henrik Stoerner wrote:

[...]

A new instance of bind seems to have resolved the issue.

This would not likely work.  The total time that MRTG runs is about 3
minutes 40 seconds, with a fair chunk of that single-threaded (and thus
not CPU bound on my multi-processor box).  To limit bb-net tests to just
that small timeslice eliminates some the the cool benefits of hobbit,
like 1-minute retries...

-- 
Daniel J McDonald, CCIE # 2495, CISSP # 78281, CNX
Austin Energy
http://www.austinenergy.com