In <41F382C2.5070902 at cisco.com> Charles Jones <jonescr at cisco.com> writes:
I have several questions, so I'm just going to ask them all at once :)
OK
- Is there any way to define the amount of space put between displayed groups? When I use several group-compress sections in bb-hosts, hobbit renders the page with a rather large amount (seems like 6+ lines) of blank space between them. I have lots of hosts and want to get as many of them on the page as I can.
Each group goes into a HTML "table", and there is currently two "<br>" tags between each table. This is not configurable, the layout of the page is deeply embedded in the bbdisplay/pagegen.c code.
(Which is annoying, because it ought to be easy to modify the layout of the webpages. But that's another story).
Two "<br>" tags might be a bit much. I've dropped one of them in the next version, let me know if you think that's better.
- It would be nice to be able to use regular expressions in the "expect" option of bb-services. For instance I want to check the status of several IRC servers, and they all have different output in response to telnetting to them, but they all have the word "NOTICE", I would like to be able to do something like: expect ".*NOTICE.*", so that I could use one check for multiple servers.
OK, not terribly difficult to do, and it would make sense to use regex'es throughout (you can do it with the http content checks).
- Whenever I use the "apache" keyword in bb-hosts, it crashes hobbit, and subsequently everything turns purple. I made sure the host I had specified had the server-status option configured and enabled. I would happily provide dumps and do any troubleshooting you need, as I would really like to have the apache performance graphs.
I'd like to know exactly which program is crashing. I suppose it's the bbtest-net tool which is the one that performs the "apache" test - if it crashes, then all of your network tests should go purple. Does it work any better if instead of the "apache" keyword you define an http content check like this:
1.2.3.4 www.foo.com # cont=apache;http://1.2.3.4/server-status?auto;.
This should give the same result.
- Is there any way to put a header OVER a displayed group-compress? Any text you specify next to group-compress gets put in the column over the hostnames, Is it possible to have an option to have that text go centered over the entire group (over the column headers)?
Yes, like this:
title All of my Web servers group-compress Extranet servers ... group-compress Intranet servers ...
See the description of the "title" tag in the bb-hosts(5) manpage.
- What rules does hobbit follow for looking up hostnames?
- If there's a "testip" tag on the host entry in bb-hosts, it uses the IP-address from the bb-hosts file.
- Hostname lookup (either /etc/hosts or DNS)
- If lookup fails, use IP-address from bb-hosts
See the description of the bbtest-net "--dns" option. This is slightly different from Big Brother, which uses the bb-hosts IP for ping-tests, but hostnames for TCP tests.
- bb-services has an option to give a service multiple names. It would be nice to be able to define multiple ports as well, or even better by specifying them in bb-hosts.
You can. If you want to check ssh on port 8022, put "ssh:8022" in the bb-hosts file. bb-services just defines the default port.
For example if I want to check an IRC server, it is easy to create an irc service in bb-services, but if I want to check multiple ports of the same service on the same hosts, I would have to make multiple service definitions. How about being able to define a service, and have some keyword for port that indicates the port(s) are passed from bb-hosts, and then in bb-hosts you would specify the port, ie. "1.2.3.4 irc.bar.com # conn irc:6667 irc:6668 irc:6669"
OK, this is a bit more complicated because it would require bbtest-net to merge the results of those three tests into one status-message. That is not being done for simple TCP tests, only for http tests currently. Right now, You'll have to set these up as individual columns.
- Do you accept donations via PayPal? I would like to send you a donation for all your hard work. :-)
No, but I do have a wishlist at amazon.co.uk - just search for my name "Henrik Stoerner" on their wishlist page.
Henrik