Newbie questions

[Brodie, Kent]

First, I want to say-"wow".   I have been using BB for the better part
of the past 2 years, monitoring 124 hosts.    I always expounded upon
the virtues of BB.    

 

A few weeks ago at USENIX, I was introduced to HOBBIT- and I must admit,
I'm both thrilled and impressed.   The integrated RRD stuff is well, way
too cool for words, and more useful than you can imagine.     The
"sslcert" deal is also quite cool.   I like new toys.    Overall, the
new environment (compared to BB) is just much cleaner, and more
effective.    I appreciate all the work put into this. 

 

 

Even though I'm a (former!) BB user, I have a few questions to help me
along the way.........

 

 

1 - What is the best way to permanently disable a test for a particular
host?   I can't seem to figure out how to do this in bb-hosts or the
hobbit-clients.cfg file.   For example, in some operating systems (AIX,
for example), the messages (msgs) test will not work due to mucked up
permissions of the system messages/log file.   In these cases, I'd just
rather disable the test all together.     When formerly configured with
a BB client, the test shows up as disabled.   How to do this in HOBBIT?
(My goal, "all green"......)

 

2 - It would be super helpful if people could post samples of the hobbit
bb-hosts files here...     I am a bit overwhelmed by all of the
bbgen/display options, and am a bit confused as to how that all works.
Specifically, what I am interested in doing is grouping pages together
in different combinations.  For example, I have all of my "Sun" systems
in one group, all of my "terminal servers" in another group, etc.
With the newer page/subpage/etc functionality, I'd like to add multiple
groups that may include some of the same systems.   For example, in
addition to my "Sun", "HP", etc systems pages, I also want pages for
"Production Servers", "Development Servers", etc.     I am unclear on
how to do this without defining host entries multiple times (which, I am
assuming you want to avoid!).     Examples or whatever explanation can
be provided would be super helpful.

 

3 - Critical systems.   I am stumped, I cannot seem to get this to work,
despite following the documentation.    No matter what I do, all I get
is "All Monitored Systems OK", even though I've attempted adding
critical records via the GUI.     Am I missing something, or is this not
quite working in the current beta?

 

4 - messages/syslog click/download?   If I am in the messages screen, I
see (for example) the phrase "/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log" highlighted as
a clickable link.   But, if I click on it, my browser attempts to
download the file "bb-hostsvc.sh".       Is this a known issue?  Just
wondering.

 

 

Thanks for any help people can provide!   -kcb

 

---------------------------------------------------------

Kent C. Brodie - brodie at phys.mcw.edu

Department of Physiology

Medical College of Wisconsin

(414) 456-8590

 

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