[hobbit] Weird hobbit/proxy/CONN catch-22?

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Fri, Jul 21, 2006 at 11:08:28AM -0500, Brodie, Kent wrote:
> 
> It all works.   Sort of!      On my main BB display, I see the entries
> for the "unreachable" cluster nodes, which is very cool.    I see the
> cpu, disk, files, msgs, etc.   But--   there's no connectivity (conn)
> information or status information.  
> 
> Catch-22?   How do I get the "conn" test to show up?   If I list "conn"
> in the bb-hosts on my main Hobbit server, I am going to assume that the
> conn tests will have issues, since that server(s) really are unreachable
> from the BBDISPLAY host.      But if I set it up listed as "noconn" on
> the BBDISPLAY server--  um, there's no conn data/column (a Homr Simpson
> "D'oh!" goes here).

Run the network tests from the proxy server, which has network
connectivity to the cluster nodes, and have it report the results back
to the Hobbit server (it sounds as if this is already in place, it's
just the BBDISPLAY setting in the proxy server's hobbitserver.cfg).
I.e. enable the [bbnet] task on the proxy server, and setup a bb-hosts
file on that server with just the cluster nodes and whatever network
tests you might want to run against them (ping is default, but there
might be other network services you'd like to keep an eye on).

Even though there's a "noconn" setting in the Hobbit server's bb-hosts
file, a "conn" status sent by the proxy server will show up on the web
pages. "noconn" only has effect on what network tests are being run 
from the Hobbit server.

> By the way - a suggestion for stuff down the road a bit:   When I set up
> my proxy server (./configure -server), there was of course all of the
> requirements I had to have met, such as having RRDTOOL, libpng, etc etc
> all there.    That's great, except I have no intention of having this
> other server doing anything other than running a few tests, and
> forwarding it all on to the BBD server.   No data, no RRD, no graphs, no
> apache, no html.      One big suggestion I have (since the proxy is such
> a cool thing) is to perhaps including things like:  ./configure
> -proxy-only   ?    Just a thought.   This may or may not be
> complicated...     

It's not terribly complicated, it just needs a bit of work with the
configuration scripts and Makefile's. There is one or two setups
that which would be relevant: A network-tests only build, and a 
bbproxy/hobbitfetch build. In the future it might be relevant to
have a web-only build (if I decide to split up the webserver part
from the Hobbit data-collection part).


Regards,
Henrik