[hobbit] Clients reporting to both a BB server and Hobbit

[Henrik Stoerner]

Hi Kimberly,

On Mon, Nov 07, 2005 at 05:41:53PM -0800, Kimberly McKinnis wrote:
> I saw the recent thread regarding using bbproxy to replicate the
> display, and would like to do something similar. However, ideally, what
> I'd like is to use something like bbrelay to have the clients report to
> both hobbit and bb, while I get hobbit fully set up. 

So you are going to run BB and Hobbit in parallel, on different servers,
and just want to feed Hobbit with the data the flows into your current
BB system - with as few changes as possible.

> I know the alert
> structure is a little different, and I'd like to have time to tweak
> things and such instead of doing an abrupt cutover. Is it possible to
> have the clients actually report to both servers, such that both bb and
> hobbit will process the data (as bbnets or whatever).

I think "BBRELAY:ip.of.hobbit.server" on you BB server will do what you 
want. I've never used BBRELAY myself, but the docs and the bbd source
code points in that direction.

There are two things you should be aware of with this. First, it will
obvious add some load to your BB server. All incoming messages must be
copied out to the Hobbit server, and BB does that by forking (twice) a
child process for each incoming message. If your BB server is running 
with a high load, you should keep an eye on it to see if it can handle
the extra load that BBRELAY puts on it. If that turns out to be a 
problem, then an alternative way of doing this is to use Hobbit's bbproxy 
tool on your BB server: Change BB to listen on port 1985 (the BBPORT
setting in recent BB installs), and run bbproxy on port 1984 with it
forwarding to the local BB on port 1985, and the remote Hobbit server.

Second, the Hobbit server will be fed ALL status messages from the BB
server - including the BB servers network test results. So perhaps
you should start out with the [bbnet] task disabled in Hobbit, and only
run the display part of Hobbit - if you do run network tests in both BB
and Hobbit, your Hobbit server will get updates from both sources. If 
they happen to disagree on a status, you'll see it flapping between the
BB-determined status and the Hobbit-determined status.


And a final tip: Use a dummy script to handle alert e-mails while you 
test the Hobbit server - change the MAIL and MAILC settings in
hobbitserver.cfg to run the dummy instead of the real "mail" command.
It is not funny to get all alerts in duplicates...

> I want BB to remain fully functional for the time being,
> as I'm monitoring over 2000 machines with paging and ext and pg scripts
> which kick off other things.

That will be interesting, it is an installation about the same size as
my own.


Regards,
Henrik