Hi y'all

I have some questions about the use of supplemental client messages (by specifying a collector ID in the "client" message). The man page has very little to say on the matter.

I want to have a client-side script that collects the latest BIND DNS statistics and feeds them to the Xymon server via a supplemental client message. This is achieved using the following type of command (simplified for the exercise):

{ echo "client/named_stats $MACHINE.$SERVEROSTYPE $CONFIGCLASS" echo "[named_stats]" cat /path/to/latest/named.stats } | $XYMON $XYMSRV "@"

This generates the following in the client data webpage:

<begin example> [collector:named_stats] client/named_stats dns.example.com.freakos freakos

[named_stats] +++ Statistics Dump ++ (1234567890) ... ++ Outgoing Queries ++ [View: default] 12345 A 345 NS ... ++ Resolver Statistics ++ [Common] 9693 mismatch responses received [View: default] ... <end example>

My questions regarding this are:

1. Should I be including the $CONFIGCLASS in the report, like other client messages? Xymon puts the class onto a newline when I do this. The man page says the class is optional for a client message, but if I wanted to change the class, I don't think I would be able to. Or maybe it only makes sense to specify the class for the main client message, and not supplemental ones.

2. When I write the server-side processor, I'll need to collect the output by specifying the client section name of [named_stats]. But there's also a "[collector:named_stats] section heading that gets created automatically. Should I be adding the "[named_stats]" section at all, or instead making use of the [collector:named_stats] that gets created regardless? It probably doesn't matter if I have both, but I don't want to break anything, including some future intended use of these extra client messages.

3. The content of the client data section I'm sending happens to have square bracketed terms like "[Common]" and "[View: default]". This makes it impossible for me to fetch the whole [named-stats] section. My instinct is to escape these somehow, but I don't know of any standard "Xymon" way of doing this beyond a simple backslash.

Cheers Jeremy