Redundant Hobbit Servers
I'm interested in knowing what everyone is doing for redundancy. I currently have 2 hobbit servers and each one performs the same tests as the other.
I find this to be a bit wasteful and am looking for the active/passive type of configuration that has been talked about on this list before.
This configuration works fine, except for alerting. In order to not be overwhelmed by messages, I only have one hobbit server performing the alerting task, the other only sends alerts on the other hobbit host.
I have considered using the "depends=" test, but then I have to maintain two separate bb-hosts files, rather than copying and pasting from one to the other.
Is there a better way than what I'm doing? My goal is to have both servers configured the same, as much as possible, and have only one of them at a time send me alerts.
I'd love to know what you guys are doing to get around these limits. I could easily have missed something in the newest update that solves this problem, but I haven't seen it yet.
Thanks for your thoughts on this subject.
Michael
On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 11:13:01AM -0500, Lowery, Michael wrote:
Is there a better way than what I'm doing? My goal is to have both servers configured the same, as much as possible, and have only one of them at a time send me alerts.
The simplest solution is an active/passive cluster using a bit of shared storage (SAN, NAS or whatever). Put the Hobbit configuration- and data-files on the SAN, and setup two hosts in an active/passive cluster. When one host dies, make the cluster fail-over and start up Hobbit on the other.
There's a description of setting up a Linux cluster like this in the "contrib/" directory in Hobbit 4.0.3+.
If you dont worry about preserving full history and trend graphs in a fail-over situation, you can skip the shared storage requirement and just setup the two hosts as a cluster. I'd then recommend using rsync regularly to synchronize the configuration files and also the checkpoint-files in the server/tmp/ directory - the checkpoint files contain a snapshot of the Hobbit server memory so if those are copied over to the failover server, it will start up with a fairly recent view of your system, including all of the info about what hosts have been disabled, which alerts have been acknowledged etc. Synchronizing these every 10-15 minutes will get you very close to a completely transparent failover.
Regards, Henrik
Michael,
I have not yet put 2 or more Hobbit servers in a redundant configuration. Although I have build a simular setting with 2 BB servers. Here are a few hints:
For (configuration) file syncing don't count on Hobbit, use other tools like rsync or even better cvs with pserver. Another option here is using clustering tools, have a look at http://tentakel.biskalar.de/similar for a list of handy distribution scripts or try tentakel self. This is a nice way to push bb-hosts files to your clients too.
I'm sure you have allready made both servers a BBdisplay and BBnet in your bb-hosts file, and configured all your clients this way also so they report to both servers. Make both of them BBpager too, just one with a filled hobbit-alert.cfg (master) and one with an empty hobbit-alert.cfg (slave). In the master hobbit-alert.cfg make a rule which runs a script when bbd is red or purple on your slave hobbitserver. This script has to login through ssh and copy the master hobbit-alert.cfg over your slave hobbit-alert.cfg. Now your second hobbitserver is master (next to your first hobbitserver).
Good luck! Arnoud Post
Lowery, Michael wrote:
I'm interested in knowing what everyone is doing for redundancy. I currently have 2 hobbit servers and each one performs the same tests as the other.
I find this to be a bit wasteful and am looking for the active/passive type of configuration that has been talked about on this list before.
This configuration works fine, except for alerting. In order to not be overwhelmed by messages, I only have one hobbit server performing the alerting task, the other only sends alerts on the other hobbit host.
I have considered using the "depends=" test, but then I have to maintain two separate bb-hosts files, rather than copying and pasting from one to the other.
Is there a better way than what I'm doing? My goal is to have both servers configured the same, as much as possible, and have only one of them at a time send me alerts.
I'd love to know what you guys are doing to get around these limits. I could easily have missed something in the newest update that solves this problem, but I haven't seen it yet.
Thanks for your thoughts on this subject.
Michael
To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
participants (3)
-
arnoud＠koekiemonster.com
-
henrik＠hswn.dk
-
mlowery＠alliedtechgroup.com