[hobbit] big brother replacement

Josh Luthman josh at imaginenetworksllc.com
Sat Nov 3 03:46:05 CET 2007


I really like this mailing list - you learn quite a bit even just by reading
the questions of others.  I'm the only system administrator around here so I
need a shoulder to lean on every once and a while!

Are you saying you've used BB so much that you know it too well and need a
replacement?  Sounds kind of backwards to me =P

On 11/2/07, joe <joe at tmsusa.com> wrote:
>
> We have no official bb support, just google, and the experience of local
> sys
> admins. But it's been here so long that infrastructure has grown up around
> it,
> which really drives the need for a drop-in replacement.
>
> Joe
>
> Josh Luthman wrote:
> > Joe,
> >
> > Do you have any support to any extent with BB?  The main reason I
> > switched was that there was a mailing list to look to for support.
> > Secondly, it wasn't BB.
> >
> > Josh
> >
> > On 11/2/07, *Sloan* <joe at tmsusa.com <mailto:joe at tmsusa.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     Deiss, Mark wrote:
> >     >
> >     > For a vanilla BB environment, you can have multiple BBDISPLAY
> entities
> >     > but the recommendation is that there is only one BBNET entity. A
> BBNET
> >     > server that is generating the pings out to the clients will be
> >     sending
> >     > the ping results to all of the BBDISPLAY entities (as defined on
> the
> >     > BBNET host). If you have multiple BBNET entities that ping the
> same
> >     > servers, you will be sending duplicated results as far as the
> >     > individual BBDISPLAY servers are concerned (the connection
> messages
> >     > will be renamed to the host being pinged). To support multiple
> BBNETs
> >     > in a non-race environment requires additional coding to carefully
> >     > direct the BBNET results to not trip over each other. The default
> >     > behavior is to pump them out to whatever BBDISPLAY is listed - you
> get
> >     > the race conditions when you want all the BBDISPLAY servers to
> >     monitor
> >     > all of the BBNET hosts (i.e. want BBNET to send their client-side
> >     > tests to the BBDISPLAY entities - this will result in the BBNET
> poll
> >     > messages going out to all the BBDISPLAY entities also).
> >     >
> >
> >     Interestingly enough, we've been running redundant bb servers for
> each
> >     lan, without any concern for race conditions and while that has it's
> own
> >     peculiar behavior in corner cases, we've never seen any sort of
> real,
> >     intractable problems with it. The general consensus here is that
> >     redundancy is good, except for the notifications - we don't want to
> be
> >     notified twice for every incident, thus the so-called bb "failover"
> >     capability saves us that annoyance with no extra hacks required.
> >
> >     I probably made it sound a lot more sophisticated than it really is
> - we
> >     really just have active/active BBNET/BBDISPLAY servers, with the
> >     delegation of BBPAGER decided by the failover status.
> >
> >     It looks like Henrik has a good roadmap to get there in 4.3 from
> what I
> >     read here, so hopefully we've got our bb replacement at last. The
> only
> >     other concern is that we copy all bb notifications as snmp traps to
> >     netcool, but it looks as though that should be with a hobbit plugin.
> >
> >     Joe
> >
> >     To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> >     hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk <mailto:hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Josh Luthman
> > Office: 937-552-2340
> > Direct: 937-552-2343
> > 1100 Wayne St
> > Suite 1337
> > Troy, OH 45373
> >
> > Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
> > --- Henry Spencer
>
> To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
>
>
>


-- 
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373

Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
--- Henry Spencer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/attachments/20071102/8cabf688/attachment.html>


More information about the Xymon mailing list