September 2008 - Xymon - Xymon mailman web

Secondary ping?
by michael.nemeth＠lmco.com 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

Heres the problem my hobbit server can ping HostA and HostB but SOMETIMES HostA and HostB cannot ping each other . Besides a client side script, anyone think of a way to do this and take advantage of hobbit functionality. BBNET? route ? something else?

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Latest stable snapshot?
by david＠basis.is 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

Hi all, We manage several systems and use hobbit for monitoring all of them. I was hoping someone might be able to tell me what is the current recommended version to be running? 4.2.0 is getting very old and does not include a large number of features we like. One of our systems was updated to a snapshot at some point, which is generally working okay but still has some problems (history viewer crashes occasionally, but can always be resolved by simply refreshing the page). I'd now like to find a stable 4.3 release that we can deploy instead of that. From what I've gathered the snapshots are not generated anymore. The SVN seems to be generally very unstable from what I've seen (I've tested two checkouts in the last few days and both have kind-of worked but had more severe crashing issues with the viewers than the current snapshot). I'm also a bit confused by the fact that the SVN does not seem to match the snapshots. One of our systems (which is working very well) has a snapshot which identifies itself as 4.3.0-0.20080327. The source for that snapshot is lost at our end. Looking through the SVN the versions which have that string in include/version.h are versions 5614 through 5626. None of these revisions compile as the file hobbitd/client/hmdc.c does not exist but is referenced in the build! Was there an out-of-tree patch made for the snapshot release? Anyway, any pointers or advice from others running 4.3 snapshots would be greatly appreciated. :) Kind regards, Davíð Steinn Geirsson Basis ehf.

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connection alert on a quorum
by tj_yang＠hotmail.com 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

Is it possible to configure hobbit server to send out alert only when 2/3 machines failed during the night time ? "route:router1,router2,...." is close but it is not a quorum. tj

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Disabled tests report
by Vernon.Everett＠woodside.com.au 30 Sep '08

30 Sep '08

Hi all Is there a way (or has a report been written) to show what was disabled over the last period (a month say). Ideally, I would like a list of disabled test, by whom, from, to, reason. Does this report exist? Regards Vernon NOTICE: This email and any attachments are confidential. They may contain legally privileged information or copyright material. You must not read, copy, use or disclose them without authorisation. If you are not an intended recipient, please contact us at once by return email and then delete both messages and all attachments.

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Define hobbit alerts on a page level
by Jelle.Smet＠teleatlas.com 29 Sep '08

29 Sep '08

Hi all, I've been experimenting with defining alerts on a page level. The goal I want to reach is having the ability to exclusively alert for the checks which are displayed on a certain page. The goal in this example is to send alerts only for test1 and test 2 and not test3 using only the pages. However if I look at the info bullet for host1 and host2 I don't see any alerts defined for them. This is most likely because of the 0.0.0.0 hostname # noconn definition. Is there a way to reach the goal to alert only on a page level when server will be a member of multiple pages? Thanks, J.S bb-hosts: Page all_hosts 10.9.8.1 host1 # test1 test2 test3 10.9.8.2 host2 # test1 test2 test3 Group-only test1|test2 Page alert_level_1 0.0.0.0 host1 # noconn 0.0.0.0 host2 # noconn Hobbit-alerts: PAGE=alert_level_1 MAIL someone at somewhere.com DURATION>6 REPEAT=5

1 0

DNS setting
by bsd＠todoo.biz 29 Sep '08

29 Sep '08

Hello folks, I have configured hobbit to take care of the monitoring of my hosting services. So far I have had no problem… but with DNS service. 1. I was unable to figure out where and how dns is called by hobbit. 2. I have many false positive received from this server. I am managing DNS services where the classic request on "yahoo.com" or any other domain name from the net will not feet… These DNS services do not necessary act as resolver… at least not for the "yahoo.com or google.com" They are master server and need to be querried in a specific way. So my question is: where and how can I tune DNS services requests in Hobbit? Thanks. ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ Gregober ---> PGP ID --> 0x1BA3C2FD bsd @at@ todoo.biz ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ P "Please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this e-mail"

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hobbitd_rrd not starting an extra script
by graham.nayler＠hallmarq.net 29 Sep '08

29 Sep '08

Sébastien I think this one is pretty simple - ready to kick yourself? Try putting "=" (without quotes) instead of the blank after --extra-script and --extra-tests! Once that's done though you may hit another problem, over which I've been tearing my hair out for the last week. I got the graphs connected up OK, but values were only being written into it very intermittently. I've finally tracking it down to a bug in the external script handler do_external.c (at least in the version we're running - snapshot as of 9th Sept). This does not apply to 4.2.0 - but we had troubles getting that to work with BBWin (we're monitoring Windows boxes). The problem is that recent versions of hobbit caches writes to RRD, but the external script is handled by a forked process, which only operates on a copy of the cache controller, and not that of the main process. I'll submit my fix (albeit crude) when I've worked out haw to do so (I'm really new to this open source stuff)!, Graham Nayler Sébastien Munch wrote: Hello I'm trying to create an extra script for hobbit_rrd. I've followed tutorials found on the net, especially http://www.trantor.org/theshire/doku.php/tutorials:customgraph I'm getting the information in the status page. Data is correctly sent to the hobbit server. Everything seems to be configured correctly, but I'm not getting any rrd data. In the configurations, I've double-checked paths, execution rights, etc. To simplify the tests, I've changed my extra-script so that it writes everything in a temporary file. The script isn't started : it doesn't write in this temporary file. In the rrd-status log, I don't see anything about executing the extra script. hobbitlaunch.cfg : ---------------------------------------------------------- [rrdstatus] ENVFILE /usr/lib/hobbit/server/etc/hobbitserver.cfg NEEDS hobbitd CMD hobbitd_channel --channel=status --log=BBSERVERLOGS/rrd-status.log hobbitd_rrd --rrddir=$BBVAR/rrd --extra-script /usr/lib/hobbit/server/ext/rrd_openvz.sh --extra-tests openvz --debug [snip] Graham Nayler

3 2

bb-notes install
by URMM＠VM.MARIST.EDU 28 Sep '08

28 Sep '08

I'm trying to get bb-notes working with Hobbit. I followed the README up until it mentioned updating two scripts mkbb2.sh and mkbb.sh. Neither exist on my Hobbit server, so I assume they are referring to scripts from Big Brother. Anyone know what to do next? I have updated hobbitserver.cfg to turn on BBGENOPTS option docurl. I just can't seem to get the Hobbit web page to recognize the add.php, change.php and notes.php scripts. Martha McConaghy Marist College

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Suspected bug in External Script handling
by graham.nayler＠hallmarq.net 26 Sep '08

26 Sep '08

Hi guys, (Bug report and fix submitted here as Sourceforge looks 'not particularly' active) I've just started setting up a Hobbit system to monitor a load of Windows boxes (using BBWin), and am implementing our custom tests using external script mechanism. Once I finally got my head around the Hobbit/BBWin interface and worked out that it's really simple to implement, just very confusing to find the right document to look at, the test columns and graphs were displayed fine, but with dodgy data in the graphs. The problem though is that RRD only intermittently gets its updates - maybe once every 15-20 minutes. I eventually realised that it's a problem with the update caching implemented in hobbitd_rrd. This is using the snapshot version as of 2008/Aug/02. The bug does not apply to version 4.2.0 from SourceForge. The majoirty of the internal tests cache RRD updates using static data held in do_rrd.c (v1.61 2008/04/02). External scripts though are handled by forking to a child of the hobbitd_rrd process in do_external.c (v1.22 2008/03/22) - I assume to avoid a midbehaving user script from snarling up the whole system. Once the data is collected from the script it then passes it on to RRD in the normal way. However, the forked process uses a copy of the static data, so this goes into a different cache to that in the main process. And once done the child process goes away - without forcing the cache to empty. Following this logic, the cache never fills up enough to flush itself, and so the data don't make it to RRD (which rather begs the question of how I got anything in the graph at all - but then that's a side issue). The obvious solutions appear to be: 1) don't fork to a child - but that would allow misbehaving scripts to hang the system 2) fork, but pass the data back to the parent process once it's done - possible, but not a trivial fix 3) fork as currently, but flush the cache before closing the child process - not particularly elegant, but simple to implement. I've implemented a fix of type 3. It's important to only flush what is handled by the external script handler, as the parent process will still have it's copy of the cache at the time of the fork, and will flush that itself in the normal course of events. There is a function in do_rrd.c that allows a partial flush of the cache - rrdcacheflushhost(). This flushes everything that matches the supplied "hostname", which can be the full path to the RRD archive, or a leading substring thereof. If it is only external scripts supplying the test data, then no keys matching that test name will ever be held in the parent process cache, so this path can be used as a key to flush the cache prior to exiting the child. The name of the repository (RRD file) is held within the do_rrd module context as the static string "rrdfn", which is accessible to the worker functions. This is used in the following fix to generate the match string - it's a bit ugly but it works. So, in do_external.c,v 1.22 2008/03/22 07:48:55 in function do_external_rrd() declare a char * variable called extkey then after line 106 (within the R_DATA case) : create_and_update_rrd(hostname, testname, classname, pagepaths, params, NULL); insert extkey = (char *)malloc(strlen(hostname) + strlen(rrdfn) + 3*sizeof(char)); if( extkey ) { sprintf(extkey, "/%s/%s", hostname, rrdfn); dbgprintf("%09d : Forcing flush of '%s'\n", extkey ); rrdcacheflushhost(extkey); xfree(extkey); } This is now working reliably for me. If the external script is used to feed additional data into one of the internal test repositories this fix will fail - with that internally generated data being written both by the parent and the child. A work-around for that would be to make a similar rrdcacheflushhost() call prior to the fork, so clearing out any such entries from the parent, and then the child can write out only the data it generated itself EXCEPT for the fact that we haven't worked out what rrdfn is by that time. Another alternative would be to put in a switch to temporarily prevent the caching mechanism inside create...rrd. The simplest though is...just don't do it! As an additional observation, the rrd-status.log shows that at or around the termination of the child process the message pipe receives an EINTR completion, then loops around and restarts the message wait. I've no idea whether this is to be expected - although it looks a bit odd. I've not done much *NIX IPC development though, so I'll leave that one to the experts. Graham Nayler www.hallmarq.net

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Hobbit and BBWin0.12 Windows Event logs
by khemrajk2003＠yahoo.com 26 Sep '08

26 Sep '08

Greetings all, I need help setting up the hobbit-client.cfg file to monitor and ignore the windows event logs (application, system, security). Here is a sample of what I have in hobbit-client.cfg: LOG %.*application.* %error COLOR=red LOG %.*application.* error COLOR=red IGNORE='%VSS (8193) -*' LOG %.*application.* error COLOR=red IGNORE='%Application Error (1000) -*' I have played around with different syntax, but I cannot seem to get it right. Here is a sample output (I know the alert does not match what I have above, it is just an example): failure - 2008/08/20 07:39:23 - Security (578) - Privileged object operation: Object Server: &unknown failure - 2008/08/20 07:39:23 - Security (578) - Privileged object operation: &unknown failure - 2008/08/20 07:26:56 - Security (578) - Privileged object operation: Object Server: I get the security failure in this example with the blinking red dot, but then I get the same messages with the &unknown. If anyone that has set this up correctly can please advice, it would be great. Thanks in advance for the help, Dev Khemraj

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