On Tue, May 30, 2006 at 11:16:59AM -0500, Hubbard, Greg L wrote:

Hobbits:

Some general questions, based on 4.1...

A) Do you know if the keywords in bb-hosts are case sensitive? I noticed that the documentation is very careful to match case in examples as well as the definitions -- but some keywords are in ALL CAPS and others are lower case. One wonders why this is so...unless they are case-insensitive, and it is just a curiosity in Hobbit-lore...

It's mostly historical, based on the Big Brother ancestry.

I don't have the full picture in my head, but in most cases it is not case-sensitive. The "bbgen" and "bbtest-net" are slightly more picky, for historical reasons - they still do some parsing of the bb-hosts file by themselves. Specifically, I know the "depends" and "route" tags are case-sensitive.

B) Regarding the "route" keyword? Can these be chained, or does the whole path have to be specified for each item in the file?

Example: hobbit server -- firewall -- router a -- router b -- host -- app

Can it be coded this way?

Firewall no route statement Router A route:firewall Router B route:router A Host route:router B

Or do I have to say this:

Router B route:firewall,router A Host route:firewall,router A,router B

The latter one will definitely work. I am not sure if the first one will; a quick glance at the code appears not to support these tree-like dependencies.

It would be nice to feed a map of your network topology into Hobbit so when some router breaks, it will automatically know what tests will go red as a result. It's just a little difficult to implement, I think. Especially how you would describe your network topology.

C) I have some custom tests that are run by the client on "Host" -- these messages (which go purple) don't seem to get suppressed if a node is unreachable because of something else. Is there some way to code this to take advantage of the downstream suppression?

If you have a "conn" test for that host, they shouldn't go purple. <checking the code> wait, that only works if the "conn" test is red,yellow or blue - not clear, which is what the dependency checks make it. Will fix.

BTW -- Henrik -- I have seen the downstream suppression stuff work -- awesome! It is a lot more difficult to achieve this in my commercial tools.

Thanks, Henrik