[hobbit] Long question about BB clients and HOBBIT clients

[Henrik Størner]

In <15930.1228928020 at rds059> Bill Benedetto <bbenedetto at goodyear.com> writes:

>There was a thread recently about screen-scraping the
>SERVICE=info webpage to get the OS off of it.  That seemed pretty
>useful/cool to me so I tried it.  However, my SERVICE=info
>webpage doesn't have the OS on it.

It needs data sent by the Hobbit client to determine the OS.
And *that* requires 1) that you have a Hobbit client installed
(an old BB client isn't good enough), and 2) that you're running
the client in the (default) centralized configuration mode.

The easy way to check that is to see if e.g. the "cpu" status for
a host has a "Client data available" link near the bottom of the 
statuspage. If it does, the OS info should be available.


>More nosing around led me to the hobbitdboard command although it
>did take me quite awhile to figure out how to use hobbitdboard.
>I was somewhat dismayed to finally figure out how to use
>hobbitdboard just to discover that when I did this command:

> % .../bb 127.0.0.1 "hobbitdboard test=info fields=hostname,BBH_OS"

>that there was no BBH_OS field available.  (Or maybe it was
>available but empty...?)

Probably the latter. BBH_OS was introduced with the 4.2 release.


>Anyhoo, I somehow figured out (I no longer remember HOW I figured
>this out) that I could modify one of my BB client scripts to do
>this:

>  $BB $BBDISP "client `$UNAME -n`.`$UNAME`"

>which pretty much seems to work.  I can now do the aforementioned
>hobbitdboard command and get the OS returned.  Cool stuff.

It's fairly obvious that you have no idea what this actually
does. I'm having vivid images of Mickey Mouse as the sorcerers 
apprentice, wreaking havoc with all the brooms he creates 
by accident ...

A "client" message sent to the Hobbit daemon must report
client data: CPU utilisation, disk utilisation, logfiles,
process-listings etc. The server-side code expects that to
be present, and if it's not - well, bad things happen.


>The second side effect is much more impressive and the real
>reason for my email today.  Since implementing my addition to
>most of my BB clients, I now get 2 MSGS reports from each of
>those clients every update period.  So every 5 minutes I get 2
>MSGS reports.  

Like I said: Bad things happen.

[snip]

Dont.
Do.
That.


Regards,
Henrik