[hobbit] ACK with Delay

[brent.mccrackin at bell.ca]

We use RIM pagers to receive our BB alerts.  This allows us to
acknowledge alerts by replying to the message, and the bb-mailack script
takes care of everything else - including using the ACK code to identify
the user that is performing the ACK.

Granted, using the email address could be worked into the script, but
everything that I have in place now uses the ACK code as generated by BB
with dependencies on the Pager ID in the code.  Not every alert comes in
through the web interface.


Would it be posisble to 'preconfigure' the pager codes?  Instead of
having Hobbit generate the codes based on position in the matched rules
list, define the ID codes in advance in the config files.  Then we
always know which ID belongs to which pager, regardless of how the rules
are built.

---
Brent B McCrackin
UNIX Systems Specialist - Bell Sympatico
Brent.McCrackin at Bell.ca   PH: 416-353-0692
"Serenity through viciousness."
 


-----Original Message-----
From: Henrik Stoerner [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk] 
Sent: February 14, 2005 11:30 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: Re: [hobbit] ACK with Delay


On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 09:39:52AM -0500, brent.mccrackin at bell.ca wrote:
>
> The ACKCODE in BB is made up of a 5-digit alert code and a 2-digit
pager
> code to identify who the alert was sent to.  The 5-digit alert code is
> the same for all recipients of that alert.  The pager code would
change
> depending on the sequence that the matching rule was encountered in
the
> bb-warnrules configuration.  Replacing the provided pager code with a
99
> in the ACK input would acknowledge the alert for all recipients
(except
> the escalation ones marked with ^).
> 
> Is this feature retained in Hobbit?

No. the acknowledgement cookie in Hobbit only identifies a
host+service. The same ack-cookie is sent to everyone who is alerted.

The main reason Hobbit does not generate unique cookies for each
recipient is that to do so, the core daemon (hobbitd) and the alert
module (hobbitd_alert) would have to be a lot more aware of each other
than they are now.


> If not, how do we identify who acknowledged an alert?

Make sure you include that information in the ack message you provide
when ack'ing the alert.

I admit that this isn't something I've given much thought, because it
isn't a real problem for me. But I've just added a bit of code to the
bb-ack CGI, so if you have the acknowledgement web form in the secure
CGI directory (which is the default setup), then the username used to
login to the secure area will be included in the ack-message, and
shown on the status page.


If that is not good enough, then we'll have to discuss how to do it 
for the next release.


Regards,
Henrik

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