In <41F126C7.1050102 at nandomedia.com> Tom Georgoulias <tgeorgoulias at nandomedia.com> writes:

I was considering setting up a standalone hobbit server for testing, but building that hobbit server on the same system as my BB server to ease the migration off of BB.

First off, is this a good idea? I've been reading the install & migration docs and it seems like this could work, but I want to be sure my impressions are correct. I ran through the configure step using $BBHOME/hobbit as the hobbit install dir & bb as the userid and created a makefile. After the Makefile was created, I checked it out and the thing that scared me enough to post this message was the use of port 1984 by hobbit. That's going to conflict with my current BB server daemon and its normal operation, right?

It will conflict with your current BB server, since they will be fighting over port 1984. My suggestion for running BB and Hobbit in parallel on the same server would be this:

1. Change BB to listen on another port, say 10001. If you're running BB 1.9e then this is set with the BBPORT option; if not, you need to modify $BBHOME/src/bb.h, "make", "make install" and restart BB.

2. Setup Hobbit to listen on a different port, e.g. 10002. You just install it normally, then add the option "--listen=0.0.0.0:10002" to the "hobbitd" command in etc/hobbitlaunch.cfg

3. Run "bbproxy" (comes with Hobbit and bbgen). bbproxy listens on port 1984, and forwards all incoming requests to one or more BB/Hobbit servers. So you have bbproxy picking up the incoming requests, and then it forwards these requests to multiple servers. E.g. with the port numbers above, you would run "bbproxy --bbdisplay=127.0.0.1:10001,127.0.0.1:10002 --bbpager=127.0.0.1:10001"

You dont need to include the Hobbit portnumber in the "--bbpager" option, since Hobbit handles alerts differently, acting solely on the status message it receives - it doesn't need an explicit message saying "you need to send this out as an alert".

The only remaining problem is if you want to run network tests from the same server, because then BB and Hobbit will each be running their network test tool. So all network tests will be reported twice. For that, I think the easiest way around it is to stop one of them from running - e.g. to stop the BB network tests, remove "BBNET" from the bb-hosts entry and restart BB; for Hobbit you would just comment out the "[bbnet]" section in hobbitlaunch.cfg. Then try running each of them for a day or two to verify that the Hobbit one works OK (it should, since it's been part of bbgen for over a year now).

Regards, Henrik