On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 11:26:41AM +0700, Zakki Ashshidiqi wrote:

I call dns,smtp,pop3,noconn,noping as a tag. So, is there any 'how-to' to add my own tag? Let say, my tag is 'roaming'. In the bb-host will be like this (for the host I want to do a 'roaming' test):

10.10.10.10 www.yyy.xxx # roaming

I already made the script, but I don't know how hobbitd will call my script. Should I just put it as an ext script?

The short answer:

If your script does all the work of generating a status message and sending it to Hobbit using the "bb" commandline tool, then you can just run it as an external script.

The long answer:

You don't say if your script is one that runs on each of your clients and reports a status for only that client, or if it's something that runs on a central server and generates a status for several hosts. That can make a difference:

• client-side scripts generally don't need any kind of tags in the bb-hosts file; you just run them on the client, and they generate a status message. Hobbit picks up whatever status messages arrive, and puts them on the web display.

• server scripts may need a tag in the bb-hosts file, if they have been written to look for one. It is fairly common to have server-side scripts that perform some custom test on a series of hosts, and you can use a tag in the bb-hosts file to tell your script which hosts it should test. But you don't have to; it depends on how you want to implement your script. If you want to use a tag in the bb-hosts file, your script should do something like this.

  #!/bin/sh

  Name of the column we generate

  COLUMN=mytest

  The tag we look for in the bb-hosts file

  BBHOSTSTAG=mytest

  bbhostgrep --no-extras $BBHOSTSTAG | while read L; do set $L HOSTIP=$1 HOSTNAME=$2 MACHINE=echo $HOSTNAME | sed -e's/\./,/g'

  do your test against the host with IP $HOSTIP

  COLOR=... # The color you decide MSG=... # The message text you pass back

  $BB $BBDISP "status $MACHINE.$COLUMN $COLOR date

  $MSG" done

  The "bbhostgrep" picks out those lines in the bb-hosts file that has your tag in them, and you can then get the IP-address and hostname for each of them. Using this tool is the best way, because it does all of the tricky parsing of the bb-hosts file for you - and it works if you start using include-files into the bb-hosts file, or your admin begins splitting up entries onto multiple lines etc.

Regards, Henrik