Henrik, Thanks for the reply Mike
-----Original Message----- From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of henrik at hswn.dk Sent: Monday, January 23, 2012 1:01 AM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: Re: [Xymon] IP address in bb-host file
On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:30:34 -0800, "Mike Cavanagh" <mike at terrapintesting.com> wrote:
Please comment on pros/cons to using 0.0.0.0 for "all" hosts vs. the actual IP address in the bb-hosts file? I see I can use 0.0.0.0 for an IP and Xymon will lookup the IP address.
Xymon will do a DNS lookup on the hostname, unless you explicitly use the "testip" tag on a host.
The presence of an IP in the hosts.cfg / bb-hosts file is a remnant from the days when Xymon was an add-on to the "Big Brother" system - this system relied on the IP in the bb-hosts file for network testing. Although Xymon has evolved a lot, it has retained much of the configuration file format from the Big Brother days, including this.
Currently, the only advantage of having the IP in the bb-hosts file is that this will be used as a "fall-back" IP in case the DNS lookup fails. So there really is no problem in just having "0.0.0.0" as the IP.
I have some plans to re-do the configuration system for Xymon v5, and one of the changes that will happen is probably that the mandatory IP-address in hosts.cfg will disappear, so you only need to specify it when it will actually be used.
Regards, Henrik
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