Hi Henrik,

Thank you for your reply.

I think explaining what TheState does is easier if I just show you an extract from its README:

Big Brother is really great at noticing things that come from a single source and happen on a regular schedule, but unfortunately many things that we'd like to watch don't fit this model. These include log events, tape change requests from robotic jukeboxes, and most importantly, alerts generated by other programs.

The current Big Brother solution is to write an extension check on these things every X minutes. Unforutnately this is more work than should be necessary. If your SNMP monitoring program can already send an alert to tell you that your T1 has reached 99% saturation, or if your backup system will trigger an alert when it needs a new tape then why shouldn't we be able to send this information directly to Big Brother?

This is what The State does. If an existing program or script can call external program when something goes wrong then you can use The State to feed that information into Big Brother.

The State also includes a CGI script to help manage big brother warnings and warnings from The State.

TheState is available on deadcat btw. We are currently moving BB from a Solaris System to a Linux based one, but TheState is poorly documented now. It is a perl script but the initial install changes the bbd program (not sure how though).

I like the look of hobbit, but we also have windows clients. This may not be a problem as the windows team might get their own monitoring system, but can the windows bb client talk to hobbit? I noticed that hobbit also used the 1984 port.

I wouldn't mind helping to either create a new version or test it, but I have to say that my perl scripting isn't the best!

On 10/04/06, Henrik Stoerner <henrik at hswn.dk> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 10, 2006 at 09:01:01AM +0100, Mario wrote:

...

I'm a current Big Brother user, who is looking into Hobbit. I was wondering if anything like TheState existed?

I'm not familiar with this BB extension, so please explain a bit more what it does and how it's used.

...

Is migrating from BB to hobbit difficult?

No. You can re-use all of your bb-hosts configuration, clients, and client-side extensions. Server-side (on the BBDISPLAY server) extensions may need some work - many run just fine on Hobbit.

Your alert-configuration will need to be re-written; Hobbit has a completely different alert setup.

You can replace the BB clients you use with the Hobbit client; it gives you some nice features, but is not required for the initial migration.

If you're using the LARRD add-on, you'll need to re-arrange your RRD files into a new directory structure; there's a script in the Hobbit sources that does it for you.

Henrik

To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk