Greetings! We've been using Big Brother in our datacenter here for over 5 years now, and I've been testing out Hobbit for a few weeks now, planning to eventually migrate to it. One of the things I'm trying to accomplish before moving fully to Hobbit is to integrate some of the customizations I've made to BB.

The one feature I'm focusing on right now is similar to the "Instructions" section handled by NKedit. In my custom BB, I edited a section of dohostsvc.c to read in files containing plain text or html. This content gets placed at the bottom of any page generated from bb-dohostsvc.sh.

Basically, a file called comments.conf resides in $BBHOME/www/comments/ and looks like this:

----[cut]----

This is the configuration file for the Special Instructions section on

all Big Brother alert pages. To create a new alert message, put whatever

text you want into a new file, call it anything you like, but try to

stick to the convention of group.service. Wildcards also work, but place

them at the bottom of the file, so that absolute matches can override

the wildcard entries.

NOTE: Make sure there are no trailing spaces at the end of the line.

I'll be adding in error checking code for that asap.

Portal Application Servers rules group

hostname*.int.*.us.army.mil.disk appservers.disk Army_Home_Page.http Army_Home_Page.http mail*.http mail_servers

Place all wildcard matches below here

*.cpu ALL.cpu *.disk ALL.disk *.msgs ALL.msgs *.procs ALL.procs *.http ALL.http *.conn ALL.conn ----[cut]----

Then, in the same directory, you just create the files like appservers.disk, or mail_servers, whatever you've called them, and the content loads whenever anyone goes to a bb-dohostsvc.sh page that matches. It works really well, and the only downside is having to ssh in and manually edit the conf file and content files. But you can use any html code you want, and don't have to worry about extra spaces, line feeds/carriage returns, etc.

What I need to do now is decide how best to proceed with setting this up in Hobbit. I'd like to be able to edit the content from the web interface somehow. The "Instruction" field in the existing nkedit is good for short comments, but we've been using long descriptive html output with web links and such. With some experimentation, I found that you can do the same thing in nkedit, but you have to remove any special tags like nbsp; and all newline characters or it makes the hobbit-nkview.cfg file unreadable.

I'm going to start looking at the source for bb-hostsvc.sh tomorrow to see where I'd need to make changes, but I wanted to throw this out there to see if anyone had any thoughts. If anyone else would also like my existing code for BB, I can post that. :)

Matthew Epp Sr Unix Engineer Army Knowledge Online (PEO/EIS) / CherryRoad Technologies Sitesupport Engineering (SEO)