August 2006 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

[hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating?
by JMSmith＠stvincenthealth.com 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

I have to second everything that Kent said. I am still in the process of switching from BB to Hobbit, but I've had it set up and running since January. I really, really like it. I'm going to continue using BB for a while to send messages and alerts to the help desk folks, since I want to filter out a lot of things that they might panic about but aren't really critical issues. Hobbit will be the main monitoring system for the rest of the technical staff. Jim Smith -----Original Message----- From: Brodie, Kent [mailto:brodie at mcw.edu] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 4:37 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: RE: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating? Most of the comments have addressed specific concerns. I will however, add my two cents worth, having just upgraded from a pure BB situation. First off, I was never aware of Hobbit. I got introduced to it when I was playing with my BB setup at Usenix, and someone basically said "cool, but have you seen THIS?". As soon as I got home, I fired up Hobbit on a test server, and began to play. Here's my observations, all of which I hope you can appreciate: * Building, installation: Much better, and cleaner than BB. In fact, the BB clients insisted you configured the local (client) bb-hosts file with "itself". Not necessary with Hobbit. Cool part: Once you get a particular client built (say, for Solaris 2.8/2.9), you can tar it up and untar it on the remote clients. Set up a hobbit user id, set up the init.d script, and voila. I had to deploy this across 140 servers. I got to the point where I could set up a new client in about a minute and 30 seconds. * Configuration: As said, most of the stuff is configured ON THE SERVER. This is just *so* much better than BB. All of my tests, alarms, etc, are on the server. Only exception are client-based EXT scripts. I grabbed one for Oracle monitoring (bb-moracle) and it worked with hobbit just great. * Performance: I am monitoring 140 servers from a single-processor P4 server. Barely uses any resources. The network tests work much faster than how BB handled it. My average system load is 0.2. Woooof. * RRD: This is what sold me. The built-in trend graphs are well.... just far too cool for words. Trend graphs for cpu use.. disk... memory, etc. We had a huge ORCA installation that I trashed when I saw this. * Remote enable, disable: Very very cool. Yes, there's a bit of a learning curve for things like the hobbit-alerts.cfg file, or hobbit-clients.cfg file, but these come with time after playing, and we'll help you out. Overall, since I fired this up in lieu of BB, I haven't looked back and am *VERY* impressed with what I have seen. And I used BB a lot. And, development is active and the community is growing. The "old" BB is basically dead from what I can see. -----Original Message----- From: Gary B. [mailto:gmbfly98 at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:55 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating? > First, after reading through whatever I could find on the website I am > still a little bit confused about configuration and setup........................ To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk NOTICE: This email contains confidential or proprietary information which may be legally privileged. It is intended only for the named recipient(s). If an addressing error has misdirected the email, please notify the author by replying to this message. If you are not the named recipient, you are not authorized to use, disclose, distribute, copy, print or rely on this email, and should immediately delete it from your computer system.

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[hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating?
by brodie＠mcw.edu 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Most of the comments have addressed specific concerns. I will however, add my two cents worth, having just upgraded from a pure BB situation. First off, I was never aware of Hobbit. I got introduced to it when I was playing with my BB setup at Usenix, and someone basically said "cool, but have you seen THIS?". As soon as I got home, I fired up Hobbit on a test server, and began to play. Here's my observations, all of which I hope you can appreciate: * Building, installation: Much better, and cleaner than BB. In fact, the BB clients insisted you configured the local (client) bb-hosts file with "itself". Not necessary with Hobbit. Cool part: Once you get a particular client built (say, for Solaris 2.8/2.9), you can tar it up and untar it on the remote clients. Set up a hobbit user id, set up the init.d script, and voila. I had to deploy this across 140 servers. I got to the point where I could set up a new client in about a minute and 30 seconds. * Configuration: As said, most of the stuff is configured ON THE SERVER. This is just *so* much better than BB. All of my tests, alarms, etc, are on the server. Only exception are client-based EXT scripts. I grabbed one for Oracle monitoring (bb-moracle) and it worked with hobbit just great. * Performance: I am monitoring 140 servers from a single-processor P4 server. Barely uses any resources. The network tests work much faster than how BB handled it. My average system load is 0.2. Woooof. * RRD: This is what sold me. The built-in trend graphs are well.... just far too cool for words. Trend graphs for cpu use.. disk... memory, etc. We had a huge ORCA installation that I trashed when I saw this. * Remote enable, disable: Very very cool. Yes, there's a bit of a learning curve for things like the hobbit-alerts.cfg file, or hobbit-clients.cfg file, but these come with time after playing, and we'll help you out. Overall, since I fired this up in lieu of BB, I haven't looked back and am *VERY* impressed with what I have seen. And I used BB a lot. And, development is active and the community is growing. The "old" BB is basically dead from what I can see. -----Original Message----- From: Gary B. [mailto:gmbfly98 at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:55 PM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating? > First, after reading through whatever I could find on the website I am > still a little bit confused about configuration and setup........................

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[hobbit] Shire: update
by cgoyard＠cvf.fr 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hi, talking about categories, one thing that deadcat misses is the display (and search) of the column name generated. People sometime use really generic names, such as "files", "size", "modules" or "test" (you bet) for very application-specific matters. It can also prevent name clashes. Just a idea. -- Charles Goyard - cgoyard at cvf.fr - (+33) 1 45 38 01 31

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BBWin Preview 0.8 available
by etienne.grignon＠gmail.com 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hello everyone, I publish today BBWin 0.8 (a free Big Brother Hobbit Windows client). You can download the MSI installer of this preview from http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbwin This preview contains the following stuffs: + New Features * svcs agent has now a delay setting which tell the agent to do not monitor the Windows services for a short time after the startup of the computer * Msgs agent have priority and count options * You may use environment variables for hostname and paths settings (registry and BBWin.cfg) * Cpu agent can monitor uptime like the original Big Brother client. It is off by default. * Cpu agent reports usage for each cpu * ext directory is now created at the installation so the tree really looks like hobbit tree. * hostname, logpath, binpath, etcpath, tmppath registry settings can be environment variables (e.g.: %VARNAME%) * default hostname is %COMPUTERNAME% + Updates * cpu agent on multi processor computers is now sending the correct cpu usage * disk is now reporting correctly disk which had a size smaller than 1 mb * autoreload is now on by default * BBWin doesn't exits any more on configuration errors * Msgs default delay for matchs rules may be overridden by a generic setting * Msgs now reports date with 24h time format + Important note : * A memory leak has been discovered in BBWin 0.7 due to a bug in the CRT library shipped with Visual C++ 2005. I'm forced to use the Visual ToolKit 2003 since not update is available yet for this bug. (SP1 public download not yet available) Here the page that explain the bug : http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=129031&SiteID=1&PageI… http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/ViewFeedback.aspx?Feedba… Important Upgrade note : If you are upgrading from an older BBWin version, the disk, procs, and externals agents may not be upgraded because of a version error in the old package. So, the easiest way to upgrade BBWin to 0.8 is to delete disk.dll, procs.dll and externals.dll before the upgrade or by doing a repair by the MSI package after the upgrade. There are not too many new features in BBWin 0.8 in appearance but, deeply, it was an important upgrade because I changed a lot of thing so BBWin can have the centralized mode hobbit mode to follow the steps of the Unix side. Because it wasn't enough terminated and because the hobbitd backend part is not yet started, I didn't include it in BBWin 0.8. However, this version corrects many stuffs. To finish, as you can see, I'm a bit slower than Henrik to implement features... I'm still an hobbit padawan :) Have a nice day, -- Etienne

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Windows Client
by Vernon.Everett＠dpi.wa.gov.au 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hi all I have been asleep for a while, and not monitoring what's been going on, but can anybody tell me the status of the Windows client? When I last paid close attention to the list, the client was in beta, and if I recall, did a pretty OK job. (I installed it on a test system) But that was at the old job. New job, new Hobbit installation, and the Windoze crowd want to see the client. What's news? Regards Vernon

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[hobbit] Shire: update
by brodie＠mcw.edu 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Agreed- "OS" would include disk ,cpu ,etc. "Environment" is for external monitors for things like, temp, water, fire, etc. Some sites use these things heavily. --------------------------------------------------------- Kent C. Brodie - brodie at phys.mcw.edu Department of Physiology Medical College of Wisconsin (414) 456-8590 -----Original Message----- From: Ralph Mitchell [mailto:ralphmitchell at gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 9:16 AM To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: Re: [hobbit] Shire: update On 8/1/06, Brodie, Kent <brodie at mcw.edu> wrote: > One category I'd like to see is a place for user-created config files to > go as examples. For example, sample bb-hosts files, hobbit-clients.cfg, > hobbit-alerts.cfg, etc. I had a wee bit of struggling to get the > behavior of some of the alerting rules right, for example. > > As far as categories in general, I agree deadcat has too many..... > > My $0.02: > > Network > Disk > Email > Databases > HTTP > Config Examples > Environment > Security > > At least to start with- perhaps a few more. I think most items can be > lumped in here somewhere. How about "OS" - or System Health?? Your Disk category could be a subset of that. It would include stuff like the Sparc/Solaris temperature monitor from Deadcat. Or would that be part of Environment? Ralph Mitchell To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk

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[hobbit] hist files
by henrik＠hswn.dk 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 01:38:20PM -0400, Michael Frey wrote: > The following error occured while attempting to apply the patch: > > [hobbit at nbtbigbro1 hobbit-4.2-beta-20060605]$ patch -p0 > <history-missing.patch > (Stripping trailing CRs from patch.) > patching file lib/availability.c > Hunk #4 FAILED at 304. > Hunk #5 FAILED at 321. > 2 out of 8 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file lib/availability.c.rej Oh, this patch was against the current release-candidate source. I'd recommend grabbing the current snapshot and building that. If you prefer, just copy the web/bb-hist.cgi and hobbitd/hobbitd_history binaries over to your current ~hobbit/server/bin/ directory. Regards, Henrik

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[hobbit] Build error todays snapshot (31/7)
by rolf.masfelder＠nector.de 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hello, where do you get this 'todays snapshot' from ? Regards Eolf Masfelder Am Montag 31 Juli 2006 07:14 schrieb lars ebeling: > gcc -g -O -D_REENTRANT -D_LARGEFILE_SOURCE -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 > -DHPUX -I. -I /home/hobbit/snapshot/include -I/usr/local/include -c > -o hobbit-notesedit.o hobb it-notesedit.c > hobbit-notesedit.c: In function `main': > hobbit-notesedit.c:157: error: `PATH_MAX' undeclared (first use in > this function ) > hobbit-notesedit.c:157: error: (Each undeclared identifier is > reported only once hobbit-notesedit.c:157: error: for each function > it appears in.) make[1]: *** [hobbit-notesedit.o] Error 1 > make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/hobbit/snapshot/web' > make: *** [web-build] Error 2 > > > Regards > Lars Ebeling > Hobbithobbyist > http://leopg9.no-ip.org > > ¤ "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the > intelligent are full of doubt." --Bertrand Russell -- Rolf Masfelder Tel.: 06321 355 207 FAX: 06321 355 224 Mobil: 0160 80 64 181 world: 0700 NECTORGMbh EMail: rolf.masfelder at nector.de http://www.nector.de

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Source code commit-messages now available
by henrik＠hswn.dk 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Someone asked a while back if I would make the revision control commit-messages available, so it would be possible to track more closely what I'd changed. I've added this to the daily snapshot build, so that it extracts the changelogs for stuff that has been checked in during the past week, and during the past 24 hours. You'll find them from the "Hobbit project" menu on http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/, or if you'd rather link to them directly then they are at http://www.hswn.dk/beta/snapshot/changelog-yesterday.txt and http://www.hswn.dk/beta/snapshot/changelog-lastweek.txt They are updated daily at approximately 22:30 UTC when the daily snapshot is generated Regards, Henrik

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Display issues with SMTP and FTP status pages - 4.2RC20060712
by rgordonjr＠gmail.com 01 Aug '06

01 Aug '06

Hello - I installed the 4.2RC20060712 system today and I am noticing some formatting issues with the status noted above the graph on the SMTP and FTP pages.. Not sure if it affects other pages as well. Mon Jul 31 22:52:14 2006 smtp ok Service smtp on monitor is OK (up) 220 ESMTP..250-monitor Hello monitor [10.5.142.16], pleased to meet you..250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES..250-PIPELINING..250-8BITMIME..250-SIZE 83886080..250-DELIVERBY..250 HELP..250 2.1.0 monitor at monitor... Sender ok..221 2.0.0 monitor closing connection.. Seconds: 0.03 In version 4.1.2, each response was on its own line... 220 ESMTP 250-monitor Hello monitor [10.5.142.16], pleased to meet you 250-ENHANCEDSTATUSCODES 250-PIPELINING 250-8BITMIME 250-SIZE 83886080 250-DELIVERBY 250 HELP 250 2.1.0 monitor at monitor... Sender ok 221 2.0.0 monitor closing connection Any ideas on how I can fix the output in the 4.2RC version? Thanks! -- --==[ Bob Gordon ]==--

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