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Problem doing hobbit configuration (nuby alert)
by damaster＠cisco.com 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

The documentation for getting Xymon up and running needs work -- little variations in the process can break things and leave you no information on what is broken! I've setup a Xymon server and ~10 clients. After setting up the server, I usually followed this process for getting the (all Linux) clients up: 1. On the client, as root, I did 'useradd -u 501 -g 501 xymon' to get the userID into /etc/passwd and create /home/xymon. 2. As xymon, I exploded the xymon tarball, did a './configure --client' and a 'make'. No errors of significance were reported. 3. As root, I did 'make install' to create the /home/xymon/client directory. 4. As xymon, I did '~/client/runclient.sh start' to get the client running. 5. On the server, added 'IP host # ssh' to the bb-hosts file and restarted Xymon. After a while, the new client would be added to the main page of Xymon with the following tests would be filled in: * conn, cpu, disk, files, info, memory, msgs, ports, procs, ssh, trends Recently, I tried doing #5 *before* doing 2, 3, and 4. Awhile after doing #5 (but before #2), the main page would update on the server with the new client, but only the 'conn', 'files', 'info', 'ssh', and 'trends' columns were filled in. After doing 2, 3, and 4 on the client, I again restarted Xymon, but the other columns (cpu, disk, memory, msgs, procs, ports) refused to be filled in. Digging into this, I can't find anything in any of the logs of all my systems (working or not) to give me a clue on how these tests run and why they are not running on some systems. These tests are not listed as tests that you enter in bb-hosts, so can anyone explain how to get these other tests running against the clients? David Masterson Taglocity <http://www.taglocity.com> Tags: Systems, SysMgmt, SystemMonitor, XYmon

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Hobbit Environment variables
by damaster＠cisco.com 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Throughout the Xymon 4.2.2 documentation, I've been seeing mention of various environment variables (BB, BBCMD, etc.), but I haven't seen anything that set them up. I've been assuming that this was just documentation shorthand to tell the reader "use the 'bb' command here", but now I wonder if that is correct. Is the a script that I should be sourcing in my (or xymon) login scripts to get the proper defintions of these environment variables? David Masterson Taglocity <http://www.taglocity.com> Tags: Systems, SysMgmt, SystemMonitor, XYmon

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randomizing execution of tests
by hobbit＠ginch.org 15 Feb '09

15 Feb '09

Greetings hobbit gurus [0], While I am still trying to search my way to an answer via the archives of this list and google, I'm hoping someone could point me in the right direction. I've got a bb-hosts file with 8 server process instances getting tested. Each instance gets tested with 3 HTTP requests (2 GET, 1 POST). All 8 server processes live on the same physical OS instance. This results in 24 HTTP requests getting sent from hobbit within 1/100th of a second. This causes the load on the host to spike, and generates contention w/in each server to satisfy the requests. This same setup is repeated for hundreds of hosts and hundreds of processes. Is there a way to tell hobbit to take all of the entries in bb-hosts and test them in a random order w/in the 1 minute testing interval? This would end up staggering the arrival of each HTTP test somewhat and lessen contention within each HTTP server and on each host. Thanks, -dave [0] Of which I am not, but ... maybe one day. -- Dave Paper MCSE is to computers as McDonalds Certified Chef is to fine cuisine.

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New release candidate - 4.2.3
by henrik＠hswn.dk 14 Feb '09

14 Feb '09

I've uploaded a 4.2.3-RC1 to Sourceforge this morning. It is 4.2.2 plus a few bugfixes and minor enhancements: * Time-out code changed to use clock_gettime() with CLOCK_MONOTONIC * Bugfix for hobbitd/hobbitd_worker communication going out-of-sync resulting in "garbled data" being logged and worker modules stopping. * NCV module now works with negative numbers. * Several bugfixes in DNS lookup code - could lead to crashes when performing DNS tests. * Switch to C-ARES 1.6.0 - drop support for older versions. * Run more TCP tests in parallel by not waiting for very slow connections to complete before starting new ones. * Added "hostlist" web utility for spreadsheet-reporting of the hosts in Hobbit. Give it a spin, and let me know if there are any problems. If not, I'll give it the official blessing to become 4.2.3 later this week. Regards, Henrik

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Want to see only red, not yellow alerts
by tlewick＠tradebotsystems.com 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

I know how to set it up in hobbit-clients.cfg so you only see red. But if you don't want yellow alerts, only red, for say CPU, do you just set yellow and red to the same load %? Thanks, Taylor

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How to list recipients of a service from all clients
by Raymond.Lee＠qwest.com 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

If I go to the "info" test for one of my clients, I see the services and recipients in the Alerting section. If I want to see the recipients for the "disk" service for every client I'm monitoring, is there an easy CLI way of doing that? Thanks, Ray This communication is the property of Qwest and may contain confidential or privileged information. Unauthorized use of this communication is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender by reply e-mail and destroy all copies of the communication and any attachments.

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Servers (and clients) with multiple IPs ?
by damaster＠cisco.com 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

In my environment, we have a lab where all the systems are on the 2.x.x.x subnet. This subnet is firewalled such that it's not visible to the rest of the company. However, there are some systems in the lab that have 171.x.x.x IPs and the firewall translates those IPs to the appropriate 2.x.x.x IP so that communications can be established out of the lab. Effectively, these systems have two IP addresses. In fact, I've put Xymon on several of these systems (including the Xymon server). While I was setting up Xymon clients that were just in the lab, there was no problem as I'd just identify all the systems by their 2.x.x.x IP. My question, though, is how to configure things on clients that are outside the lab. Obviously, when I configure the outside clients, I'll have to identify the server by it's 171.x.x.x IP. The server, though, is identified by its 2.x.x.x IP in the bb-hosts file. Will this be a problem? Are there any gotchas to watch out for? David Masterson Taglocity <http://www.taglocity.com> Tags: Systems, SysMgmt, SystemMonitor, XYmon

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non-green main view
by arne-johan.sunde＠telenor.com 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

Hi Is it possible to make a non-green main view? To have the ability to look at all servers or only the non-green ones on different pages would be great. It would also make it easier when you have multiple teams and have many servers on a page/subpage. -- AJ --

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Strange error message
by damaster＠cisco.com 13 Feb '09

13 Feb '09

I'm seeing this error message quite a bit in the various Hobbit logs -- what does it mean? 2009-02-12 14:58:32 Tried to down BOARDBUSY: Invalid argument David Masterson Taglocity <http://www.taglocity.com> Tags: Systems, SysMgmt, SystemMonitor, XYmon

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[hobbit] RHEL5 and status-board not available bug?
by flyzone＠technologist.com 12 Feb '09

12 Feb '09

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:39:35 +0100, Henrik wrote: >I'm not completely sure if you believe there is a bug in Xymon, >or in the Linux kernel of your RHEL system ... I think is in Hobbit. And I have news about it, I'll write more down. >3000 hosts is a fairly large setup. I assume you're doing data >collection for graphs for all of these servers, and that you're >running version 4.2.x of Xymon. Correct, I'll try the 4.3 in lab next week now that I know how the "bug" works. >I would guess that your problems - at least in part - stem from >the amount of I/O you're doing for updating all of the RRD-files. No, excluded at all, already tried to disable all the ext tests. However I tried also switching the data in local SCSI disks and iostat indicate a really low I/O wait. > If the problem persists, then some other explanation must be found. Must for sure....it's a big trouble saw 3000 hosts becaming purple then green then purple :) >I don't know how the change in "POSIX threading" plays into this. >Hobbit is not a threaded application, it is plain and simple >single-task application all the way through. It may have some >meaning in relation to NFS. Ups...is not a multithread? I'm not a programmer but....how it can follow 3000 hosts sending data without multithread? However here the news: the problem persist just with RHEL5 with architecture x86_64 with all kind of 2.6 kernels. With RHEL5 and x86 (32bit) there isn't the bug. I would like to try a Fedora on my notebook....I'll let you know. For us the best resolutions is to reinstall all in 32 bit, I'm already working on it (the first server it's already up, hobbit now it's working correctly just with this "little" edit) However, the problem exist also in our hobbit lab (always 64bit) stressing the Hobbit with more than 20 "virtual host" Be sure of one things: is not a hardware or bottleneck related problem, the bottleneck was before on a old machine with a I/O wait really hight, now with this two new servers is not. However, there is someone with a x86_64 architecture with similar problems? And if someone have a Redhat Developper support license, the RH support teams already told me that they can work on it. Have a nice evening. -- Be Yourself @ mail.com! Choose From 200+ Email Addresses Get a Free Account at www.mail.com

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