From jonescr@cisco.com Wed Jun 24 08:17:14 2026
From: jonescr@cisco.com
To: xymon@xymon.com
Subject: contchk.sh (submission)
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 11:22:05 -0700
Message-ID: <47A0C04D.1050903@cisco.com>
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The past week I've been trying to share any of the hobbit ext scripts 
that I wrote.  Here's another, contchk.sh. I initially created it 
because Hobbits content check does not follow "302 Redirect" response 
codes, and I also had a need to check a URL which was expecting a 
certain referrer.  I remembered I was using this script when I saw Gary 
Baluha's urlplus.pl.

Incidentally, I cannot use urlplus, as it makes use of bbhostgrep, which 
I discovered fails if your bb-host entries are too long.

contchk.sh is a fairly short bash script which makes use of curl. You 
can optionally specify a referrer to spoof. For most folks, Garys script 
is probably best to use, as it has more enhanced error messages and 
such. If anything, it's interesting to see different ways multiple 
people tackle a problem :)

Note: besides the script itself (which should reside in $BBHOME/ext), 
you will need to add this to your $BBHOME/etc/hobbitlaunch.cfg:
[contchk]
        ENVFILE /home/monitor/server/etc/hobbitserver.cfg
        NEEDS hobbitd
        CMD $BBHOME/ext/contchk.sh
        LOGFILE $BBSERVERLOGS/contchk.log
        INTERVAL 5m

-Charles

#!/bin/bash
# contchk.sh written by Charles Jones (blazer0x at gmail.com) 6/6/2007
# This script is designed to perform a content check on a URL and report the
# status to a Hobbit server.
#
# This script was created because Hobbits built-in content check 
functionality
# does not follow 302 redirects.
#
# The script parses out a "contchk" tag in the bb-hosts file. The proper
# syntax is: contchk;URL;REFERRER;CHECKSTRING
#
# Note that CHECKSTRING cannot contain spaces so you must use regular
# expression metacharacters, so use something like string.with.spaces
BBHTAG=contchk     # Name of the tag in bb-hosts
COLUMN=cont        # Column display name in Hobbit
CURL=/usr/bin/curl # Location of curl binary
CURLOPTS="--connect-timeout 30 -m 30 -s -L -b cookiejar" # Curl options
# Note: using grep because bbhostgrep fails on long lines
grep $BBHTAG $BBHOME/etc/bb-hosts | while read L
   do
      set $L    # To get one line of output from bbhostgrep
      HOSTIP="$1"
      MACHINEDOTS="$2"
      MACHINE=`echo $2 | $SED -e's/\./,/g'`
      CHECKURL=`echo $4 | awk -F";" '{print $2}'`    # Parse out the 
check URL
      REFERRER=`echo $4 | awk -F";" '{print $3}'`    # Parse out the 
referrer string
      if [ "" != "$REFERRER" ];
         then
           REFERRER="-e $REFERRER"
      fi
      CHECKSTRING=`echo $4 | awk -F";" '{print $4}'` # Parse out the 
check string
      $CURL $CURLOPTS $REFERRER $CHECKURL |grep -q "$CHECKSTRING"
      status=$? # Save greps return status
      if [ 0 -eq $status ]; then # grep returns 0 if it found something
        COLOR=green
        MSG="String <b>\"$CHECKSTRING\"</b> was found in <a 
href=$CHECKURL>$CHECKURL</a>"
        $BB $BBDISP "status $MACHINE.$COLUMN $COLOR `date` Content Check OK
        ${MSG}
        "
      else # grep didn't find anything
        COLOR=red
        MSG="String <b>\"$CHECKSTRING\"</b> was NOT FOUND in <a 
href=$CHECKURL>$CHECKURL</a>"
        $BB $BBDISP "status $MACHINE.$COLUMN $COLOR `date` Content Check 
FAILED
        ${MSG}
        "
      fi
   done
exit 0



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From gumby3203@gmail.com Wed Jun 24 08:17:14 2026
From: gumby3203@gmail.com
To: xymon@xymon.com
Subject: [hobbit] contchk.sh (submission)
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2008 11:35:51 -0500
Message-ID: <29f517690801310835i4696d199o4df5c2d0d4b6931e@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <47A0C04D.1050903@cisco.com>
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On Jan 30, 2008 1:22 PM, Charles Jones <jonescr at cisco.com> wrote:

> ...I remembered I was using this script when I saw Gary
> Baluha's urlplus.pl.
>
> Incidentally, I cannot use urlplus, as it makes use of bbhostgrep, which
> I discovered fails if your bb-host entries are too long.
>

Hmm, I haven't run into bb-host entries that long.  Can you give an example
of one of them? I'd be interested in seeing if my script can be tweaked to
work around that issue.

Incidentally, I'm working on another release of urlplus that adds form
submission checking, as well as being able to handle multiple-step form
submissions (submit something to one webpage, check the result and submit on
that new webpage, etc).  I'm also cleaning up the commenting and rearranging
a few things in the code to make it easier to modify (including a hard-coded
value that I moved to a user-modifiable constant.

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