turning off the alert module so hobbit does everything except mail alerts

[Tom Georgoulias <tomg (at) mcclatchyinteractive.com>]

We will be having a site-wide shutdown in the near future and I would 
like to find a way to prevent a deluge of emails/pages as we recover the 
systems.

Usually, we'd just enable/disable the systems/tests that we don't want 
to hear about, but that puts every test in a blue color and doesn't give 
us an easy way to see what each system is doing by simply looking at the 
non-green view.  We have to click on each status to see the "true" color 
of the test (green, red, yellow, or purple), and that won't be very 
efficient when we are dealing with hundreds of servers.

Is it possible to turn off just the hobbit alert module, so that hobbit 
will do everything like it normally does EXCEPT mail the alerts?  I 
thought about using a temporary hobbit-alerts.cfg that doesn't contain 
email addresses or killing the hobbitd_alert process (bad idea I'm 
sure), but wasn't sure if there was a better way to deal with this.  I 
didn't see anything in the hobbitd_alert manpage that addresses this 
kind of scenario, so I thought I'd ask.

BTW, we're using hobbit 4.0.4.

Thanks,

Tom