[hobbit] DNS reboot causes purples

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 08:18:55AM -0500, Bill Perez wrote:
> Which tests are going purple ? The network tests (conn, smtp, http etc.)
> or the client-side tests (cpu, disk, memory ...) ?
> 
> Henrik - It is the network test (conn) that went purple for several
> switches, router, windows servers, a unix server - there was really no
> consistency in what went purple.  I was thinking of using the dns=ip switch
> for bbtest-net to resolve this - do you think that is a viable solution or
> would I be better off looking into setting up a caching DNS server on the
> Hobbit server?

Since you wrote that you are monitoring some 500 hosts, I would really
suggest that you setup a caching DNS server on your Hobbit server.

Last I used Red Hat (Fedora), there was a "caching-dns" RPM included
with the necessary config files to set this up. All I needed to do was
to add a "forwarders" entry to named.conf, so that it would query our 
local DNS server (the one from resolv.conf) instead of the public root
DNS servers; and change resolv.conf to point at 127.0.0.1.

The --dns=ip switch will work, but I don't really like it because you 
will inevitable change the IP of one of your hosts, and you're bound to
forget changing the bb-hosts file as well as the DNS entries. That
causes some confusion and a frustrated admin when you find out why the
ping-test doesn't work.


Regards,
Henrik