[hobbit] Question from the z/VM community

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2006 at 01:48:02PM -0500, Rich Smrcina wrote:
> Is the new Hobbit client compatible with the old BigBrother server?
> BigBrother is run by a different part of the organization and I may not 
> be able to get them to change to Hobbit, but for my Linux guests and my 
> z/VM systems, I would be interested in converting to the new Hobbit code.

In the default mode, you cannot use the Hobbit client to report to a Big
Brother system. No data would ever show up, because a Big Brother server
doesn't know how to feed the client data through the hobbitd_client
module, which takes care of converting the client data into status
columns.

However, you *can* run the Hobbit client in the local-configuration
mode. When the configure script asks
   Server side client configuration, or client side [server] ?
answer "client", and the launch the client with the "--local" option.

In this mode, the client sends normal "status" messages to the Hobbit/BB
server. I'm not sure if alerts will work, though, since the Hobbit
client doesn't generate the "page" messages that the BB server expects
to trigger sending out alerts. (Hobbit ignores these messages
completely, so it did seem like a waste of time to generate them).

Note that this isn't really described very well anywhere. It means you
will have to maintain the client configuration on the client, not on the
Hobbit server.


Regards,
Henrik