In <1232649955 at mknews.sslug.dk> "SebA" <spa at syntec.co.uk> writes:

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You can also write rules to exclude recipients based on the

previous syntax. Just prefix with ! and any recipient

specified in the rule line will be removed from the

list of recipients that matches the regular rules

for all hosts don't send any notifications from=3D20 # 12AM to 6AM

and 8PM to 12AM #

!*;;*;;*;0000-0600 2000-2359;*

=20 If you only want to send alerts between 6AM and 8PM, then =20 TIME=3D*:0600:2000 will do that. Alternatively, an = "EXTIME=3D*:2000:0600" has the same effect (a more direct conversion of this rule).

That's not quite the same thing (see below), but I think if I put EXTIME rules in with the e-mail addresses in macros (for convenience), I will be able to do what I need to.

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!host*;;*;;0 6;*;robert at localhost

=20 HOST=3D* EXHOST=3D%^host MAIL robert at localhost

Not really: the BB rule says: for _all_ alerts that were due to be raised for host*, at the weekend, to robert at localhost (based on higher up rules with no ! prefix), don't send them out. In other words, cancel all previous _matching_ MAIL commands for this exclusion.

In that case I misunderstood the BB config semantics - which is not surprising, since they never made much sense to me, and I haven't used them for more than 5 years :-)

I still think Xymon may benefit from a notifications exclusions system though. (Especially for easier migration for BB users! ;)) On the other hand, it does add complication that is perhaps unnecessary. I currently use these exclusions extensively. From when someone goes on holiday (turn off all their alerts no matter what service or host they refer to), or maybe your e-mail to SMS gateway or provider has a problem and you want to stop all those e-mails (but not all the internal e-mails) being generated, queueing up and then coming through in a rather unnecessarrily expensive flood when the SMS provider starts working again.

I realize that you have a working set of configuration rules, but I think it would be a lot easier to work out a functionally identical set of rules for Hobbit/Xymon if you could describe what it is you want to achieve with the configuration, instead of focusing on how it was done in BB.

The closest to what you want to do might be to use the "IGNORE" setting in hobbit-alerts.cfg. E.g. your example: !host*;;*;;0 6;*;robert at localhost could be accomplished with something like

HOST=%^host TIME=06:0000:2359 IGNORE

although this would kill alerts for all recipients, not just those destined for "robert at localhost". And note that this must go BEFORE any of the other rules for this host.

I can see that the BB exclusion mechanism might be useful in some circumstances, but it would (obviously) make the alerting mechanism more complicated. And I'm not convinced that there's enough gained to warrant this.

Regards, Henrik