On 12/7/06, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:
I think what this really boils down to is some form of event correlation mechanism, on top of which you then apply some heuristics (that's a fancy word for "guessing") to decide what is the core issue. E.g. if we have 200 tests reporting a failure because of a DNS lookup that timed out, then we probably have an issue with the DNS server we used. But it could also be a firewall mis-configuration that blocks our outbound DNS queries, or an IP address conflict that causes our DNS lookups to go to a server which doesn't handle DNS - it is really hard for any machine to figure that out by itself.
What I had in mind was more of a baseline check, before proceeding to the other tests. Can't resolve DNS? All other tests which depend on DNS are skipped. Can't ping your default router? Don't bother with any extra network tests.
I'm unaware of a solution to this issue, and I'm considering moving to
another product because of it.
If you know of any products that are really good at handling this, I'd be interested to hear about them.
I can't think of any in particular. I've used unicenter way back when and don't recall this issue, but it's been a while. And I've only taken a cursory look at nagios.
Lastly, who is maintaining the debian package for hobbit? Both the server
and client packages still have the same bugs I reported months ago.
Since there haven't been any Hobbit releases since August, that really shouldn't come as a surprise.
True, but they are bugs I pointed out since before the release candidate. In particular, the client postconf script munges the /etc/default/hobbit-client file and needs to be edited by hand before hobbit will run. I'd be happy to provide feedback to whomever is maintaining the package (is that you Henrik?)
Thanks.