On 3/18/2013 11:04 AM, Sean MacGuire wrote:
John Thurston wrote:
We ran BB 1.9 for years, then switched to BBPE about three years ago. Earlier this month, Quest announced end-of-life for BBPE so we're looking at our options.
We have fewer than 500 clients reporting into Big Brother. But swapping them out for something else is going to painful and take time. If a xymon server will happily accept bb-client messages, then I could stand up a xymon server and replace clients through attrition.
Has anyone else recently gone down this path?
If anyone on here is old enough - they might recognize me as the original author of BB.
Yes, Sean. Thank you! We've been running bb since 1998 or 99. Does that make me old?
That having been said, I recommend moving to Xymon, and would be happy to help any BBPE users in any way I can.
Well, it was a little bit of a battle, but I got Xymon built and running on a Solaris zone. This is a thing of beauty.
I grabbed my bb-hosts file, pulled my BBDISPLAY lines out, and threw it at the Xymon server. We're rocking and rolling :) A few things I notice are:
Our BB configuration pre-dates FQDN support, so my bb-hosts file has only hostnames in it. I'll either need to disable FQDN on Xymon or insert "testip" all over my hosts.cfg. I'll probably do the latter because I think it is finally time to embrace fqdn.
I didn't import any of my ext-scripts or customizations and I see Xymon now natively supports a few things I had rolled on my own.
I've thrown a BBRELAY line in one of my production BB servers, and it works like a champ.
One thing I'm missing, though, is the equivalent of the searchable web-help we have with BBPE. I see all of the help files and I can grep them, but is there a slicker way to find things in them from the web interface?
-- Do things because you should, not just because you can.
John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska