One thing I didn't mention - if your "foo" net-tester doesn't need to be a display box, you could shut off bbgen and other similar things in the hobbitlaunch.cfg file. Just leave it running its own status check and the net testing stuff. You wouldn't even need to have Apache running. That would give you a few more cpu cycles to process the net tests.

And I'm going to copy this to xymon at xymon.com, because it seems like my earlier reply didn't go to the mailing list...

Ralph Mitchell

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Steve Holmes <sholmes42 at mac.com> wrote:

Thanks Ralph. That works great. I had read the man page about BBLOCATION/NET:, but it didn't click that it would work without major reworking of the *.cfg on the network server. It was 'the other part of the puzzle" that was tripping me up.

Thanks! Steve

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 2:02 PM, Ralph Mitchell <ralphmitchell at gmail.com>wrote:

...

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Steve Holmes <sholmes42 at mac.com> wrote:

...

All, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that after all this time using Xymon (and Hobbit and BB before that) I did not realize until today that Xymon does not use the keywords BBDISPLAY, BBNET and BBPAGER. So, now I have a need to split BBNET from the others and have been looking at the email archives and man pages but have found no explanation of how to do it.

Note I'm still on Xymon 4.2.3.

All I need is a pointer to instructions for how to configure what would be the BBNET server. The hobbitserver.cfg file talks about 'this server', but the variables there seem to be explicitly talking about the display server, so I'm confused. I know I need to run bbtest-net on the network test server, but how do I get it to send data to the display server?

You need to be looking at the BBLOCATION option in server/etc/hobbitserver.cfg. You set up a whole spare xymon-4.2.3 instance somewhere on your network and set BBLOCATION to some value:

 BBLOCATION="foo"

Go to your original Xymon instance and edit the bb-hosts file to include NET:foo for each system to be net-monitored by the "foo" instance. Copy that bb-hosts file to the "foo" machine and fire it up. The original system should stop running network tests against any "NET:foo" labelled hosts. The "foo" system should *only* run tests against those systems.

The other part of the puzzle is delivery to the original server. On the "foo" system, set BBDISP in hobbitserver.cfg to the IP of your original server.

Ralph Mitchell