[hobbit] [feature request] Client-side connectivity check

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2007 at 11:24:33AM +0200, Charles Goyard wrote:
> my company has an heavily firewalled network. A rule that says "host1 can
> reach host2 on port 670" somehow vanish (ie human error), and your
> service stops working. Most of the time, you'll be aware of it, because
> you check at the service level, or the customers phones you. However,
> for some applications, such as backups, you'll know some hours, or days
> later.
> 
> So I come up with a suggestion: be able to check if a specific port is
> reachable for the client standpoint. Socket connection can be done via
> the bb utility. [picky servers like mysql would be handled differently].

I have some cases like that in my production environment. What I've done
is to simply install the full Hobbit server on these nodes, and disable
all tasks except the client- and networktest-tasks.

If you setup the BBLOCATION setting on these nodes, you can even
configure them centrally in your normal bb-hosts file, and just scp or
rsync it everywhere.


Regards,
Henrik