[hobbit] Differences between bb and hobbit -

[Henrik Stoerner]

On Mon, Nov 05, 2007 at 04:26:17PM -0800, Sloan wrote:
> I'm noticing that, due to the many transient network glitches in wan
> connectivity, that the hobbit history shows a lot of
> red/green/red/green. This appears to be different behavior from bb,
> which gives us some knobs to turn, mitigating the effects of the
> transient glitches and preventing the alternating red/green connectivity
> status. (We've got people watching bbdisplay pages, who panic when they
> see red.)

Hobbit uses either "hobbitping" or "fping" to do the network tests. Both
have commandline options that you can use to make them more tolerant of
brief network outages, see their man-pages.

If that is not sufficient (ie the transient glitches last more than 30
seconds), then you can use the "badconn:A:B:C" setting in the bb-hosts
file to delay when the status goes red. From the bb-hosts man-page:

    Normally  when  a  network  test fails, the status changes to 
    red immediately.  With a "badTEST:x:y:z" tag this behaviour 
    changes:
    * While "z" or more successive tests fail, the column goes RED.
    * While "y" or more successive tests fail, but fewer than "z", 
      the column goes YELLOW.
    * While "x" or more successive tests fail, but fewer than "y", 
      the column goes CLEAR.

If you're monitoring hosts behind these unstable WAN links, you may also
want to look at the "depends" tag so you won't generate alerts on the
hosts when the WAN link to them is down.


Regards,
Henrik