[hobbit] stale alerts

[Gary Baluha]

I noticed this morning that our Hobbit server was sending out alerts
for the process check for a machine that was actually shown as green
on the hobbit  web page.  I checked on the monitored machine, and the
alert was indeed green, yet the server was still sending out emails as
though it were in a yellow state.  I restarted the Hobbit client on
the monitored machine, and then restarted the Hobbit server on the
server.  After doing this, I noticed the following in the page.log
file:

2007-11-14 10:26:13 Stale alert for host-name:procs dropped

(I changed the actual host name to "host-name" to protect the innocent)
What exactly does this mean?  Before I restarted the Hobbit server
process, I manually edited the alert.chk temp file and removed the
erroneous alert, but that didn't correct the problem.  It was only
after I restarted the Hobbit server process that it cleared the alert.
 Is this a bug in the 4.2.0 code, or is there something else going on
here?