On 17 July 2013 23:38, Isaac W Traxler <traxler at lsu.edu> wrote:

In the INFO web page for a host there is a field labeled Client S/W. Is this supposed to show the version of xymon client running on the host?

No, not usually. The versioning is intended to be used for automated and centralised updates to the Xymon client binaries, so that an administrator can control which version of Xymon client code is running on each meachine. The automated update system is not enabled by default, and requires, among other things, that the file $XYMONHOME/etc/xymonversion.cfg contain the current client version number. This file is usually updated by the auto-update mechanism. If you're not using this, then the file won't have a version number and so there's nothing to display here.

More info on this is in the man page for clientupdate. You can run "clientupdate--level" (as the xymon user) to show the current version, which is blank on my systems, because I haven't enabled the auto-update.

I don't know anyone who uses clientupdate for automating their client binary updates. Most modern OSes have a packaging system that provides a superior feature set (roll-back capability, dependency checking) and these should be used in preference.

If you want the client version to show in Xymon, you can run the following periodically (eg in clientlaunch.cfg):

$XYMON --version > $XYMONHOME/etc/xymonversion.cfg

Alternatively what I do on my Xymon server (because I like to keep everything centralised) is to add the following pseudo-file entry into client-local.cfg, for each server I care about:

file:( echo "client/xymonversion $MACHINE.$OSTYPE"; echo "[clientversion]"; $XYMON --version ) | $XYMON $XYMSRV @ >/dev/null

This creates a "supplemental" client messages that adds the [clientversion] section to the existing client data sent in the regular client message. If I didn't add the "/xymonversion" in "client/xymonversion" then it would completely replace the client data, and for some of the 5-minute poll cycle, all of the other client data would disappear. But by adding this "/xymonversion" suffix, it becomes a supplemental client message.

J