May 2005 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

hobbit still crashes - bbdisplay problems after adding some new hosts
by stefan_loos＠hotmail.com 25 May '05

25 May '05

Hi, I was hoping that the new release (4.0.3) fixes this but it still crashes or rather hangs with the following error messages in bb-display.log: 2005-05-25 10:27:42 Could not connect to bbd at 10.207.193.41:1984 - Connection refused 2005-05-25 10:27:42 Whoops ! bb failed to send message - Connection failed 2005-05-25 10:27:42 hobbitd status-board not available 2005-05-25 10:27:42 Could not connect to bbd at 10.207.193.41:1984 - Connection refused 2005-05-25 10:27:42 Whoops ! bb failed to send message - Connection failed When this happens no more hosts are displayed at the hobbit webpage (for a small period of time you see the hosts, but when you try to click on a specific test you run into a timeout). Telnet to port 1984 at the hobbit server didn't work then. There are normally no core-dumps when this happens. When I try to stop the hobbit server, the hobbitd --pidfile ... --restart process didn't stop - have to kill it. What I've tried so far: - try to find out if a specific test or host causes the crash - first I thought it is a specific test, but now I'm shure it's not. - disabled all my customized tests (had some for generating larrd-graphs for oracle tablespaces and sessions) - reinstalled everything Nothing helped so far. Any idea is welcome! Regards, Stefan

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BB and 4.0.3 compatibility
by peter.welter＠gmail.com 25 May '05

25 May '05

Hi, Within the release notes of 4.0.3 it says: Beginning with this release, Hobbit can no longer be used as an add-on to Big Brother. Hobbit retains compatibility with BB clients and extension scripts, but you can no longer run eg. the Hobbit network test tool and have it report to a Big Brother server. and * All remnants of Big Brother compatibility have been removed. If you want to stick with the old Big Brother tool, use bbgen. This allowed for some much needed cleaning up of the bbgen code that loaded the status data, especially for the handling of purple status logs. Also, the sending of messages has dropped all support for the Big Brother method of sending "page" messages when a status-message is sent with an alert-color, so the BBPAGE and BBPAGERS settings are no longer used. Does this means that the BBRELAY-option from a BB-server to a Hobbit-server on another host does not work anymore? Thanks, Peter

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AW: Re: [hobbit] Questions about the webpage created by hobbit
by bb4＠richter-it.net 25 May '05

25 May '05

Hi Henrik, thanks for the answer. That was exactly what I was looking for. And yes an evironment variable would be nice but is not necessary when I know where to look :-) I also changed BBGENOPTS to "...--subpagecolumns=1" but bb.html and the subpages still display 2 columns. :-( How long does it take to reflect the changes? I restarted hobbit but everything looks like before. Regards Torsten > >On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 05:57:19PM +0200, bb4 at richter-it.net wrote: >> >> I was just wandering around at the website of my hobbit installation and >> wanted to know, if there is a way to increase the time and events displayed > >> at bb2.html (... events received in the last ... minutes). >> I didn't find a variable to set in the scripts. > >The only way to change that is to modify the bbdisplay/pagegen.c file. >It has these two settings: > > int bb2eventlogmaxcount = 100; > int bb2eventlogmaxtime = 240; > >It could be done with an environment variable or a couple more options, >but noone has requested that until now, so ... > >> And maybe there is also a trick not to have 2 columns displayed but only 1. > >That one is easy - it's the "--subpagecolumns=2" option for bbgen that >does this. In the default setup, it comes from the BBGENOPTS setting in >hobbitserver.cfg. > > >Henrik > > >To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to >hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk > >

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[hobbit] citirx user graph
by rdeal＠tigr.org 25 May '05

25 May '05

yes very interested, this is something we have been looking for to help monitor our citrix cluster and keep track of license usage. Thanks -----Original Message----- From: Henrik Storner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Tue 5/24/2005 5:11 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] citirx user graph In <CAAF27359A31D44FA9A90AF7E299C36FF59D04 at EXCHANGE.TIGR.ORG> "Deal, Richard" <rdeal at tigr.org> writes: >What script is used to generate the data for the citrix user graph that >is defined in hobbit? >It doesn't seem to be using the bb-citrix.pl script on deadcat. No, this is a custom BBNT client extension I wrote for work. It's basically the output from "query session" passed through a filter that counts the number of "Active" sessions and prints out "42 users active" at the end of the report and sends it off to a "citrix" status column in Hobbit. If you're interested, I can put it up for download somewhere. Regards, Henrik To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

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[hobbit] hobbit documentation and packaging projects
by v.everett＠afgonline.com.au 25 May '05

25 May '05

Hi Henrik A documentation project would serve multiple purposes. 1. By documenting something, you reinforce your own knowledge of what you document. (Something a few of us could use) 2. If it is used, it would leave you with more time for interesting stuff like coding :) which will give you time to create an even better product instead of wasting time answering e-mails from people like myself who didn't bother to RTFM properly. (See quotes below.) 3. It makes it easy for anybody - even junior sys-admins to implement Hobbit 4. By making things really easy, you increase adoption. I have abandoned many tools in the past simply because they are too poorly documented to be easily implemented. This will increase your user-base. 5. Right now, a mailing list and e-mail is easy to manage. But how many sites out there run Hobbit? What happens to your coding time when that doubles? Triples? Increases tenfold? Don't get me wrong, I love the cosy feeling you get from a mailing list. I also love ribbing the Microsoft guys in the office when I get e-mail from the author of the product giving me assistance. I always tell them "Let's see you do that with Micro$oft". :-) But like any other open source product out there, to really grow, it needs better docs. Where would Linux be if it weren't for those handy How-to docs? Nobody is expecting you (Henrik) to do all the documentation. There are plenty of us out there who have sufficient knowledge to contribute to a documentation project, and even more who would benefit from it. Documentation projects I see as being really useful. 1. Basic FAQ (Anybody can contribute to this, just by providing the Q) 2. Setting up your own tests (How-to) 3. Creating custom graphs (How-to) 4. Simple setup guide. Most users would be sys-admins, so we don't need much help there , but we all have areas of speciality and ignorance. As an example, I struggled to get the web pages right, but only I have never set up a web server before. 5. A detailed trouble-shooting guide. (Something most products don't have) Most products have a good how-to, but nothing detailing what to do if something doesn't work, or goes wrong. 6. A list of bb scripts "converted" to work on hobbit. If you had to modify any bb scripts from deadcat to work correctly with Hobbit, what did you do, and why. 7. There's probably a hell of a lot more, but I have only had 2 double espressos this morning, so I am still struggling to think properly. (Time for another 2) A number of these can be explained by doing an RTFM on man pages for Hobbit, LARRD, rrdtool etc. etc. and then trying to tie the knowledge together. However it would be a lot easier and more efficient to create a new doc, detailing just the bits of each that we need to run Hobbit effectively Cheers V Motivational quotes for this project :-) People do not cooperate under the division of labour because they love or should love one another. They cooperate because this best serves their own interests. Neither love nor charity nor any other sympathetic sentiments but rightly understood selfishness is what originally impelled man to adjust himself to the requirements of society, to respect the rights and freedoms of his fellow men and to substitute peaceful collaboration for enmity and conflict. - Ludwig von Mises It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. - Adam Smith -----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Wednesday, 25 May 2005 4:38 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] hobbit documentation and packaging projects On Tue, May 24, 2005 at 10:47:44AM -0500, T.J. Yang wrote: > Following items that need to be done and I am willing to help on > > 1. Digitalize the hobbit compilation and packaging process for different > Unixen. > So we don't need keep answering how to compile hobbit on ??? platform > issues. I may be biased, but I don't think there's been that many "silly" questions about how to build Hobbit. Most of the cases that have been real issues have been due to my failure to write truly portable code, and they have been dealt with by fixing the code. The few things that have been truly platform-specific - like the HP-UX compiler bug that was brought up yesterday - is something that should be documented. Building "shrink-wrap" packages of Hobbit is something that I do for my personal use (it's just the easiest way to install it on many systems). And for the not-quite-so-experienced admin out there I think they are really useful to get something up and running quickly and get off to a good start with using Hobbit, instead of struggling for a couple of days with the fine details of configure, make etc. So there are Linux based packages in deb- and rpm-format. I know there are NetBSD packages of Hobbit available, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone was working on putting it into the FreeBSD "ports" collection. But I also think that most of the die-hard sysadmins here actually prefer to build from source :-) > 2. Set up a hobbit wiki page/book (on mediawiki ?) > I like mediawiki because there is a command line client in perl to > automate the wikipage update. > > 3. Prepare the hobbit document in docbook format ? > The docbook format is the final resting place of hobbit wiki. > So we can generate pdf and rtf easily. I know there was/is a Wiki for BB. If you feel it would be useful for Hobbit, go ahead - it's not a format I use very much. Probably just me being old-fashioned - e-mail and newsgroups are my preferred communication methods. > Seriouslly, please follow up this thead to let me know your comment. > Should I spend the efforts on these tasks ? Are you willing to help etc... I really appreciate your willingness to undertake some work on Hobbit, especially with documentation which most programmers really try to avoid. I do write documentation, but I may be an exception - it's simply because when the documentation exists, I get more time to do the interesting stuff (code) since I don't have to spend so much time answering questions. But before you embark on this, ask yourself: What problem will I solve by doing this ? Setting up a Wiki is fine - but only if it gets used. For that to happen, there must be stuff there that people want to read. So what's missing today - is it the "beginners guide to monitoring your network" ? Or a "How to monitor your datacenter and survive" guide ? Or maybe a "Building graphs for your Boss" description? I guess, what I'm trying to say is that you should narrow your focus - at least to begin with. Then, when you have something going, you can broaden the scope. Henrik To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ NOTICE: This message and any attachments are confidential and may contain copyright material of Australian Finance Group Limited or a third party. It is intended solely for the purpose of the addressee and any other named recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. The confidentiality attached to this message is not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken transmission or delivery to any unintended party. If you have received this message in error, please notify the author immediately or contact Australian Finance Group on +61 8 9420 7888.

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[hobbit] hobbit documentation and packaging projects
by v.everett＠afgonline.com.au 25 May '05

25 May '05

I'm in. Never built any packages but I can find out how. (Used to work for Sun, and still have a few contacts there) I am keen on getting some (l)user documentation up and running. It would be nice to have a "connect-the-dots" type of how-to and a more extensive FAQ. Anybody who has been on this list a while can probably help with the FAQ. There has to be certain "How do I ....." questions that appear more often than others. Cheers V. -----Original Message----- From: T.J. Yang [mailto:tj_yang at hotmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, 24 May 2005 11:48 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] hobbit documentation and packaging projects Hi, there In the long run (before I died ;), I plan to migrate my bb system monitoring environment to hobbit given its open-source license and availability of cookit provides commercial support. Following items that need to be done and I am willing to help on 1. Digitalize the hobbit compilation and packaging process for different Unixen. So we don't need keep answering how to compile hobbit on ??? platform issues. 2. Set up a hobbit wiki page/book (on mediawiki ?) I like mediawiki because there is a command line client in perl to automate the wikipage update. 3. Prepare the hobbit document in docbook format ? The docbook format is the final resting place of hobbit wiki. So we can generate pdf and rtf easily. I have experience on above three tasks, just need to hear a few voices to tell me to jump on these tasks ;) Seriouslly, please follow up this thead to let me know your comment. Should I spend the efforts on these tasks ? Are you willing to help etc... T.J. Yang To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ NOTICE: This message and any attachments are confidential and may contain copyright material of Australian Finance Group Limited or a third party. It is intended solely for the purpose of the addressee and any other named recipient. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this message is strictly prohibited. The confidentiality attached to this message is not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken transmission or delivery to any unintended party. If you have received this message in error, please notify the author immediately or contact Australian Finance Group on +61 8 9420 7888.

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[hobbit] New Features #2 (the 'publish-cookie' option)
by KauffmanT＠nibco.com 24 May '05

24 May '05

Henrik -- Thanks for the apache pointers -- I was headed in that direction already, this just helps the clarification (I've already got site-level subpages, so that helps). On the acknowledge -- just because there's only one of me doesn't mean I'm not paranoid (man, does that ever parse badly!) I'd like to see something along the lines of an 'acknowledge' button on the individual test detail page, with a slot for time to live, and user authentication when the button gets clicked. (I think this was where you were going, but it's near the end of the day and, to quote Mr. Gumby, "My Brain Hurts"). All I've got to do now is re-gen the openLDAP code to add kerberos support, so I can authenticate against Win2003 AD. Thanks -- Tom -----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Tuesday, May 24, 2005 4:22 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] New Features #2 (the 'publish-cookie' option) On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 01:18:01PM -0500, Kauffman, Tom wrote: > Did this make it into 4.0.3 RC1 or 2? As you've probably found out: No. I decided against it, because I really don't like the idea of putting something that is supposed to be confidential on a webpage. It's just the wrong solution, so I won't encourage people to use it. (A couple of years back, I was doing a lot of IT security work - pen-testing, vulnerability scanning and such ... I still have that slightly paranoid instinct). > Although, truth to tell, I prefer the acknowledge web page option. Me too. > And I need to dig into Apache security (pointers to appropriate doc > cheerfully accepted). I have 14 remote sites whith equipment we monitor > centrally. I would really like each site's local contact to be able to > acknowledge alerts or disable tests for his site only, while leaving the > central support group the option to handle alerts and test disabling for > all systems. Apache security is most easily setup by separating the webpages into different directories. In Hobbit, that maps nicely into putting hosts on different pages and subpages. E.g. if you have this bb-hosts file: page nyc New York 10.0.0.1 nyc-router-1 10.0.0.2 nyc-firewall ... more New York hosts ... page la Los Angeles 10.2.0.1 la-router-1 Then in Apache you can setup access rules like this: AuthGroupFile /etc/hobbit/admingroups AuthUserFile /etc/hobbit/adminusers AuthType Basic AuthName "Hobbit monitor" <Directory /var/lib/hobbit/www> # Restrict access to the top-level page Require group globaladmin </Directory> <Directory /var/lib/hobbit/www/gifs> # Everyone allowed access to this Require valid-user </Directory> <Directory /var/lib/hobbit/www/nyc> # NYC page: Access allowed for global admins and the NYC admins Require group globaladmin nycadmin </Directory> <Directory /var/lib/hobbit/www/la> # LA page: Access allowed for global admins and the LA admins Require group globaladmin laadmin </Directory> The "adminusers" file is constructed with the "htpasswd" utility, and holds the login-names and passwords for your users. The "admingroups" file then maps a user to a group: globaladmin: tkauffman nyadmin: jdoe,bsmith laadmin: ajones So depending on what username you login with, you're mapped to a group - and that group membership is what controls your access to the Hobbit pages. You'll need to grant full access to some directories - like the www/gifs/ and the cgi-bin directory. Controlling access to the acknowledge- and enable/disable functions is a bit tricky: Acknowledge should be simple since you need the ack token from an alert so you can do it by controlling who gets alerts for hosts; the enable/disable function needs some tweaking to "lock" users into handling only their own hosts - it might require some changes to the hobbit-enadis CGI. Hope that helps, Henrik To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

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[hobbit] New Features #2 (the 'publish-cookie' option)
by KauffmanT＠nibco.com 24 May '05

24 May '05

Did this make it into 4.0.3 RC1 or 2? Although, truth to tell, I prefer the acknowledge web page option. And I need to dig into Apache security (pointers to appropriate doc cheerfully accepted). I have 14 remote sites whith equipment we monitor centrally. I would really like each site's local contact to be able to acknowledge alerts or disable tests for his site only, while leaving the central support group the option to handle alerts and test disabling for all systems. Tom -----Original Message----- From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2005 7:37 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] New Features #2 On Tue, Apr 19, 2005 at 10:44:36AM +0100, Marsh, Ian wrote: > What I'd like to be able to do is to pre-empt the alert by having > access to the ack code earlier, as soon as the status changes to red, > and have the code displayed on the individual test page. The way I > envisage this happening is that the ack code is generated when the test > turns red rather than when an alert is sent out. This code can then be > included on the tests status page where we have easy access to it. The > text could be displayed in a similar fashion to the text currently added > when an alert is acknowledged. Try the attached patch - should work against 4.0.2. Apply with cd hobbit-4.0.2 patch -p0 </tmp/hobbit-4.0.2-cookies.patch make stop hobbit make install (as root) start hobbit This makes the cookie appear on the detailed status page if it has not yet been acknowledged. By default I've disabled this - you must add the option "--publish-cookies" to the hobbitsvc.cgi command in ~/server/cgi-bin/bb-hostsvc.sh to enable this. I haven't yet made up my mind if this is a good idea or not. Another solution I've thought about is to make an acknowledge webpage similar to the enable/disable webpage, where you can choose which tests to acknowledge. And publishing the cookies on the status-page becomes more difficult with the planned changes to the alerting where escalations are handled. Regards, Henrik

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Another suggestion: Can configure script be non-interactive ?
by tj_yang＠hotmail.com 24 May '05

24 May '05

Interactive configure is good for beginner but not good for automation. Please consider modify the script to allow non-interactive configuration. Following is my partial auto configure shell script. I like to take out trick like <<_EOT_ y _EOT_ if possible. BTW, the configure script of hobbit is much better than BB's. tj <snip> rm -f Makefile MANROOT=/opt/hobbit/man \ BBVAR=/var/opt/hobbit/data \ SECURECGIDIR=/etc/opt/apacheS2048/cgi-secure \ CGIDIR=/etc/opt/apacheS2048/cgi-bin BBUSER=hobbit TARGET=hobbit ./configure \ --rrdinclude /opt/rrdtool10/include \ --rrdlib /opt/rrdtool10/lib \ --pcreinclude /opt/libpcre44/include \ --pcrelib /opt/libpcre44/lib \ --sslinclude /opt/libopenssl097/include \ --ssllib /opt/libopenssl097/lib \ --ldapinclude /opt/openldap2127/include \ --ldaplib /opt/openldap2127/lib \ --fping /opt/fping22/sbin/fping <<_EOT_ y _EOT_ T.J. Yang

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Questions about the webpage created by hobbit
by bb4＠richter-it.net 24 May '05

24 May '05

Hi all, I was just wandering around at the website of my hobbit installation and wanted to know, if there is a way to increase the time and events displayed at bb2.html (... events received in the last ... minutes). I didn't find a variable to set in the scripts. And maybe there is also a trick not to have 2 columns displayed but only 1. Thanks in advance Torsten

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