January 2008 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Admin Scripts download
by josh＠imaginenetworksllc.com 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

Does anyone have the tarball of the Admin Scripts that were once found here: http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~henk/hobbit/ I can't seem to find my archive of them =( -- Josh Luthman Office: 937-552-2340 Direct: 937-552-2343 1100 Wayne St Suite 1337 Troy, OH 45373 Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. --- Henry Spencer

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Future of Hobbit
by jonescr＠cisco.com 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

A funny thing happened this week. I was talking with a coworker about the "future of Hobbit", in other words, things that would help Hobbit gain more acceptance and grow the community. One of the things that I brought up was the need to get Hobbit included into popular Linux distributions. I am not sure of the policies or procedures for submitting and maintaining a new package into "Linux Distro X". I decided that I would make a post to the mailing list of some items that I thought would be good to grow Hobbit awareness and usage. Here's the funny part (to me anyway). I purposefully held off on posting, planning to do some research first, because I have discovered I have a "habit" of posting a question or comment to the mailing list, and seemingly moments after I hit send, I figure out the answer or find some tidbit of information that nullifies my comment :) That being said, I was stunned today to see someone (Axel Beckert) mention that they found Hobbit as a Debian package! I have recently done a search and could not find it as part of any distros. Most of the servers that I admin are RedHat (EL, CentOS, Fedora), so I'm not as active in the Debian community. I will be grabbing those packages to examine them as I'm itching to see what the "apt and lib plugins" are :) All that being said, I'm probably getting close to the "too long didn't read" limit on this post, so here is a list, totally off the top of my head, that I think could help Hobbit in the future. I don't know whether to call them suggestions or feature requests, I'm just thinking out loud. Feel free to quash my ideas, or add your own. 1. Getting Hobbit added to major linux distributions (apparently someone has already made it happen for Debian: http://packages.debian.org/hobbit) Whoever did this, please let us know so we can thank you! Lets get it added to Fedora, Centos Plus, SunFreeware, etc. 2. Moving away from "legacy" filenames and variables. While in many ways compatible with BigBrother, Hobbit is a totally standalone, different, and superior product. We should phase out the bb-* config files and have them become hobbit-* files, perhaps retaining symlinks so that any existing user-made scripts that might have the names hard-coded will still work). Everytime I am "teaching" someone how to use Hobbit, they ask "why is it called bb-hosts and not hobbit-hosts?", which then leads to a quick history lesson on how Hobbit was born :) Note that I realize you can override this with the BBHOSTS variable in hobbitserver.cfg, but the default name is still confusing for newbies. 3. Encryption of Hobbit data transmissions. I get this seemingly every time that I am explaining Hobbit..."is the data encrypted?" When I say no its *gasp!* "But it is sending sensitive information, process lists, logfile entries...over the network!". Of course there are user-end ways of handling this including using ssh to tunnel the port 1984 traffic, but this is hard to manage and doesn't scale well. I would suggest a "simple" (heh its always simple to the person who doesn't have to code it eh?) implementation of libssl to encrypt the port 1984 traffic. That would make a lot of folks (Infosec, Managment, Sysadmins) happy 4. Maybe a new website? The main hobbit website (http://www.hobbitmon.com) honestly looks fine to me, but others tell me that it looks more like a demo site (which it also happens to be), and the location of the information on what Hobbit is and does is not that apparent. I know Henrik has said in the past that he is not a web or UI designer, so perhaps we can find volunteers to spruce things up. I'd write more but I'm already way past the long-post limit, so I will wait and see if anyone is interested in discussing this topic.

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[hobbit] Future of Hobbit
by craig＠cookitservices.com 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

>This assumes you want to keep on using bb-hosts as the source of your >layout - I don't think that is a good idea. I would much rather have all >of the webpage layout stuff moved somewhere separate, so you can generate >multiple different sets of webpages from the same monitoring data. This sounds similar to what I did with BBConfigure (on deadcat). The main config file contains hosts, templates, etc. There is a separate text file that defines the web page layout (well actually the bb-hosts layout), it contains placeholders the generation script uses and fills in the hosts... (it generates the bb-hosts and other bb-* config files) I'll also vote to hold the master config data not in bb-hosts. Craig Cook

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Hobbit being taught in college syadmin courses!
by jonescr＠cisco.com 31 Jan '08

31 Jan '08

I'm happy to report that last week I was a guest speaker at MCC (Mesa Community College), located in Mesa, Arizona. The class was CIS240DL - Linux Network Administration. During the 4 hour class, I gave a complete presentation on Hobbit, and the instructor and I helped the students install their own Hobbit servers and configure them to monitor services both on the server and some remote clients. We had a couple of snags as all the workstations were CentOS, so we had to perform a few extra steps to get the prereqs, and battle SELinux :-) It seemed to go very well, and the students seemed impressed and pleased with Hobbit. I think I may have even converted one experienced student who seemed to prefer Zabbix :) The instructor seemed to enjoy the presentation as well, and it looks like I will also be invited to a repeat performance for the CIS238DL Linux System Administration class. He has also invited me to speak about Hobbit at the local LUG. So, just reporting that Hobbit is getting lots of exposure here in Arizona! _Henrik, I hope you don't mind, but for my presentation I used the slides you have up on your site as a framework_. I made sure to credit you as not only the main author of Hobbit but as the source of the slides :) I encourage others to evangelize Hobbit wherever they can. In my experience a lot of people have not heard of it, and once they see it they are like "wow" and want to start using it. The more the community grows, the better our chance of getting acceptance to the various distros, and more volunteers to help contribute code and ideas to help Henrik out. -Charles

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multiple apache instance trending question
by steve.e.mcconnell＠gsk.com 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

I have a new hobbit installation which is collecting and trending the apache status data correctly. For various reasons, I have about 7 separate apache instances on each server that I would like to trend individually as well. To accomplish this, I think that I would have to do the following in order to get hobbit (4.2.0) to trend this data: edit ~/bbnet/bbtest-net.c and copy the apache section (lines 601-637) the requisite number of times changing the subsequent apache references to something like 2apache, then 3apache, etc. Modify the ~/hobbitd/rrd/do_apache.c file basically copying the entire thing starting at line 13 (int do_apache_rrd(char *hostname, char *testname, char *msg, time_t tstamp) but changing each instance of apache to 2apache, then 3apache, etc. Then recompile and redeploy. After redeploying, I would also need to modify hobbitgraph.cfg copying the apache section and modifying with 2apache, 3apache, etc for the name of the graph as well as the rrd files. At this point, I think I should point out that I don't program in C (many would say in any other language either.) Is there anything else that I am missing? and am I making this too hard? steve steve mcconnell gsk unix application hosting support 919-282-3052

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Memory Utilization, Actual is NaN
by jkwade＠futurefrontiers.com 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Hello, I was just wondering about the Hobbit Memory Utilization graph. Actual and Swap show up great, but I'm getting "NaN" for all the actual graphs. I'm just wondering what Hobbit uses to pull the actual.rrd file. Thanks.James

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How to add a New Task and New Column
by arun.thangappandi＠ge.com 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Hi, Please let me know how to add a new task or a new test and new column which defines the parameters that to monitored for that task. I tried by adding a new task by adding the needed entries in the hobbitlaunch.cfg .Please help me in the getting out this. Thanks & Regards, Arunkumar

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Graph problem
by James.Roberts＠hants.gov.uk 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Hiya Has anybody had a problem where the graphing is working fine within trends but not with in the individual monitors? The graphs worked fine for a day but has stopped after 24 hours or so.

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sort pages alphabetically
by robert＠schetterer.org 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Hi @ll is there an easy options to sort output pages alphabetically, it seems that per default they are sorted just like they are written in bb-hosts -- Best Regards MfG Robert Schetterer Germany/Munich/Bavaria

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[hobbit] array drive monitoring under hp servers G5 with solaris 10 x86
by michael.nemeth＠lmco.com 30 Jan '08

30 Jan '08

Ive solaris 10 x86 running but no arrays; but the "meta" commands works. try /usr/sbin/metadb . If that returns data then get meta.sh from deatcat. Works with my sparcs.

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