[hobbit] Hobbit newbie from BB: differences and what may I lose from migrating?

[Gary B.]

> First, after reading through whatever I could find on the website I am
> still a little bit confused about configuration and setup. With BB, you
> install and configure each client and server on the local machine,
> except for the universal bb-hosts. Is this the same on Hobbit, or does
> Hobbit use a central configuration file that is modified only on the
> server to configure clients? I am trying to figure out the difference
> between installing, maintaining and configuring BB and Hobbit setups.
> Hobbit looks alot more complex to setup, but once I get my feet wet is
> it any harder than BB?

Actually, I find Hobbit easier to setup than BB.  It is especially
easier to maintain
and manage, since all configuration of hosts is maintained on just the
server.  No
need to update the individual clients when changing monitoring aspects.  As far
as adding hosts, you add hosts to the bb-hosts file on Hobbit with
almost identical
syntax as BB.  I think you could even take the bb-hosts file from BB,
put it as-in
in Hobbit, and it will just work.  I haven't done this, though, and
have preferred to just
create a new bb-hosts.

> Second is performance. I know this list may be biased toward Hobbit, but
> is it actually faster? We have about 50-100 clients on BB and I did not
> notice any performance issues. Hobbit looks like it is very complex, so
> does this mean it uses a lot of resources on the client and server? What
> speed/ram server is usually the minimum recommended for a dedicated
> Hobbit server? Would something like a dual Pentium II 266mhz have any
> performance issues as a server, if it does nothing else? What about for
> clients? We have still have some testing, stating and production servers
> left that are singe chip Pentium III 700-850 mhz, and even a couple
> Pentium II's. Just need to make sure all the resources used for things
> like graphs are taken from the server and not each client.

At home, I have the Hobbit server running on a dual P2-350 Mhz without
any issues.
At work, we have now about 150 or so clients being monitored on a
high-end P3, which
also serves several other functions.  Hobbit runs very well on this,
and I would say your
dual P2 266 won't have any issues.  Since Hobbit is written as a
compiled C program,
its performance is very good.  Think of Hobbit as BB, only easier to
maintain, more
features, and native-compiled performance.

> Third is plugins. Are BB plugins compatible with Hobbit? Also how hard
> are plugins to write for Hobbit? I don't know if these even exist for
> bb, but I ultimately would like to integrate plugins that 1) monitor
> legato tape backup, 2) run nmap to see what ports are open/can be seen
> from an external machine, 3) run 'lshw -html' to show a list of all the
> hardware on the system, 4) monitor uptime, 5) monitor OS and kernel
> versions (uname -a and head -n 1 /etc/issue), 6) maybe some more
> router/network monitoring stuff and 7) maybe some kind of LVS
> monitoring. I am not a programmer, but many of these can be done with
> either existing commands or can be done on BB with existing plugins and
> some (like lshw -html) are mostly static.

I believe most of the existing BB plugins (such as those available
from deadcat) will
work "out of the box" with Hobbit.  In fact, Hobbit is essentially based on BB's
functionality and configuration.  As with question 1 above, I would
say that Hobbit
is easier to write plugins / external scripts than with BB.

> Fourth is relay. By this I mean monitoring systems on a private
> subnetwork that are only accessible to the Hobbit server by going
> through an intermediate server. Is this possible with Hobbit and is it
> any more difficult to do than on BB?

Hobbit uses port 1984 just like BB, and essentially the same protocol.
 If you can
set up an SSH tunnel or other relay with BB, it will work with Hobbit.

> Fifth is portability. BB is very portable, I can make a 'model' client
> for say Red Hat and tar it and distribute it very easily to every server
> I have using only a few commands. Is Hobbit the same, or are there
> client dependencies or other things that may make this more difficult.

It will work the same.  In fact, we have done just that.

> Sixth is development. How active is the development of Hobbit, how big
> is the community, etc? How many people can attest to having fully
> functional hobbit setups, how long has it been around and how often are
> new releases usually made? Also I saw something this morning about a
> Windows client -- how stable is that? How stable is the Solaris version?
> Is there a client for Mac OSX? Is Hobbit like BB in the sense that you
> can change paths to system binaries like grep and sed to allow easy use
> on other UNIXes like OSX? When will 4.2 be officially released as a
> production version? Since we have a working BB setup for now, I need to
> decide if I should try to start migrating now or if I should wait some
> time for Hobbit to develop more before I migrate from BB.

Hobbit development is very active.  There are nightly snapshots, and
it is the most
developed piece of software I've been using.  Most of the beta versions are more
stable than a lot of production software I've used.