[hobbit] Monitoring Backups

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Joshua Johnson <joshua at stenhouseconsulting.com> wrote:

2.  Have the Exchange server script send files (ftp or SMB) to the

   Hobbit server. These files will then be processed by a server side script which could use bbhostgrep to check the files and send the alerts into Hobbit.

My $0.02 - is there a compelling reason not to just send email to your Hobbit server?? I've done it that way when it wasn't possible to deliver reports via hobbit/bb protocol over port 1984.

The way it works is, my (old, decrepit, Redhat 7.2) Hobbit server is running sendmail. In /etc/aliases I have:

 msgman:   "| /usr/local/sbin/msgman"

which allows me to send email to msgman at hobbit.myserver.com. Any incoming email for that address is piped through the msgman script, which could be written in bash, perl, C, python, &c. What comes through the pipe via stdin is a bunch of headers, including From, To, Date & Subject, then a blank line, then the body of the message. Here's one way to break out the message into useful bits:

 #!/bin/ksh

 # First line is "From sender date"
 read junk sender date

 while read token string
 do
    # Detect a blank line
   if [ "X$token$string" == "X" ]; then
     break;
   fi

   # extract the Subject line
   if [ "X$token" == "XSubject:" ]; then
     subject=$string
   fi
 done

 # pick up first line in body
 read text

 while read line
 do
   # pick up any other body lines
   text="$text\n$line"
 done

 # Do "stuff" to discover the system name, the test name, the

color and some message # ...

 LINE="status $SYSTEM.$TEST $COLOR `date`
 $MESSAGE"

 /home/hobbit/server/bin/bb 0.0.0.0 "$LINE"

I don't think you'd need to load the hobbit environment (I've got this running in an old BB hierarchy) just to deliver the report.

It's not exactly rocket science, but I then I already had email working and didn't want to have to maintain ftp/scp/smb across the company network. I imagine there's a way for Postfix (and other MTA's) to deliver to a pipe, but maybe not - I simply haven't tried because it ain't broke... :)

Ralph Mitchell