Hi Kent,

thanks for the kind words - I'm glad you like Hobbit.

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 11:25:13AM -0500, Brodie, Kent wrote:

Even though I'm a (former!) BB user, I have a few questions to help me along the way.........

1 - What is the best way to permanently disable a test for a particular host? I can't seem to figure out how to do this in bb-hosts or the hobbit-clients.cfg file. For example, in some operating systems (AIX, for example), the messages (msgs) test will not work due to mucked up permissions of the system messages/log file. In these cases, I'd just rather disable the test all together. When formerly configured with a BB client, the test shows up as disabled. How to do this in HOBBIT? (My goal, "all green"......)

"Disable" has the special meaning of "making the status blue", but I get the impression that is not what you want - you'd like to remove it altogether from the display.

The current release- and beta-versions will not let you do that, but I've just committed a change so you can remove any of the columns from the client-side tests through a new tag in the bb-hosts entry. E.g. if you want to avoid having a "msgs" status for the host foo.bar.com, then the entry in bb-hosts would be

10.0.0.1 foo.bar.com # NOCOLUMNS:msgs

2 - It would be super helpful if people could post samples of the hobbit bb-hosts files here... I am a bit overwhelmed by all of the bbgen/display options, and am a bit confused as to how that all works.

You're not alone. The safe thing to do is to start out with the default setup and just copy your bb-hosts file over from Big Brother - the default setup should give you just about the same setup as you have in BB. Then you can begin playing with all of the fancy new stuff.

I'd recommend settling down with a cup of coffee, and browse through some of the man-pages. They're all available on-line through the "Help" menu in your Hobbit installation, and they should cover all of the configuration files and tools.

Specifically, what I am interested in doing is grouping pages together in different combinations. For example, I have all of my "Sun" systems in one group, all of my "terminal servers" in another group, etc. With the newer page/subpage/etc functionality, I'd like to add multiple groups that may include some of the same systems. For example, in addition to my "Sun", "HP", etc systems pages, I also want pages for "Production Servers", "Development Servers", etc. I am unclear on how to do this without defining host entries multiple times (which, I am assuming you want to avoid!). Examples or whatever explanation can be provided would be super helpful.

Basically, you have two ways of doing that.

1. Add some extra pages to your normal Hobbit display. You just add them to the bb-hosts file and list the hosts you want on those pages, but instead of copying the entire configuration entry for a host, you just add it with an IP of "0.0.0.0" and a "noconn" tag. E.g.

   page sun Sun servers
   10.0.0.1  www.foo.com  # http://www.foo.com/
   10.0.0.2  dns.foo.com  # dns
   10.1.0.1  wwwtest.foo.com # http://wwwtest.foo.com/
   
   page prodservers Production systems
   0.0.0.0   www.foo.com  # noconn
   0.0.0.0   dns.foo.com  # noconn
   
   page testservers Test systems
   0.0.0.0   wwwtest.foo.com # noconn

   When a host is defined twice in the bb-hosts file like this, the second definition is merely a "place-holder" for the webpages. All of the network tests and the other definitions are taken from the primary definition.

   This gives you one set of webpages, with sub-pages for the various groupings you'd like.

2. If you want to isolate the groupings completely, then you can use the "Alternate pageset" method, where you generate multiple sets of webpages, with selected hosts going on different webpages. See the "Building alternate pagesets" description in the bbgen(1) man-page.

3 - Critical systems. I am stumped, I cannot seem to get this to work, despite following the documentation. No matter what I do, all I get is "All Monitored Systems OK", even though I've attempted adding critical records via the GUI. Am I missing something, or is this not quite working in the current beta?

It should work in the current beta, but the documentation link from the Help menu is missing the screenshots. They are included in the menu on my site, at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/help/criticalsystems.html

4 - messages/syslog click/download? If I am in the messages screen, I see (for example) the phrase "/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log" highlighted as a clickable link. But, if I click on it, my browser attempts to download the file "bb-hostsvc.sh". Is this a known issue? Just wondering.

Which browser are you using ? The link you're clicking sends back data with a content-type of "text/plain" - some browsers (e.g. Konqueror from the KDE project) will not display this inside the browser, but prefers to download the file and bring up an external editor to display it. It might be possible to alter this behaviour through a configuration setting in your browser (in Konqueror, you do it via the Setup -> File associations menu - tell it to use the embedded viewer).

Regards, Henrik