[hobbit] Request for comment about a resolution for Monitoring ServiceNames with white spaces

[Etienne Grignon]

Hello Matthew,

2008/5/12  <Matthew.Roberts at nt.gov.au>:
>
> Hi Again,
>
> I didn't get a response to a post made to this mailing list about monitoring
> Services with names that were multiple words separated by a whitespace character
> http://www.hobbitmon.com/hobbiton/2008/05/msg00001.htm so I did some searching
> through the hobbit source code to find out where my problem lay and managed to
> identify the problem and resolve it.
>
> The problem seemed to be in the way that the data containing the list of
> Services and their status is formatted by the BBWin client when sent to the
> Hobbit Server. It uses whitespaces to format the Service information into
> columns so that it can be viewed in a nice way rather then scattered all over
> the screen. To handle these whitespaces and determine which columns actually
> contain useful data, the nextcolumn function inside lib/misc.c is used to
> determine the location of these whitespaces within the string so that the
> getcolumn function can be used to retrieve the ServiceName, StartupType and
> Status for each service. This works brilliantly for services that are one word
> or use an underscore character to separate the words, however fails when the
> ServiceName contains a whitespace. In case I didn't explain this very well, an
> example of what was being returned is:
>
> If the service name is Alerter
>
> namestr = getcolumn(p, namecol) which returns Alerter
> startupstr = getcolumn(p, startupcol) which returns Disabled
> statestr = getcolum(p, statecol) which returns Stopped
>
> If the service name is multi word such as "VMware NAS Service"
>
> namestr = getcolumn(p, namecol) which returns VMware
> startupstr = getcolumn(p, startupcol) which returns NAS
> statestr = getcolum(p, statecol) which returns Service
>
>
> I am not a C programmer and the first time I actually looked at source code
> written in C was to diagnose this problem. However I have managed to resolve the
> problem by writing my own function within the bbwin.c source which checks the
> string returned by getcoumn(p, startupcol) and if it doesnt contain either
> StartupType, automatic, manual or disabled, then to keep looping until one of
> these strings are located. Due to the fact that I am not a C programmer, and
> that we rely heavily on Hobbit for our system monitoring, I am posting this to
> the mailing list so that I can get comment from Henrik or someone else who does
> have knowledge in C programming on the changes I have made and tell me if they
> can identify any flaws in it which may jeopardize the Hobbit application. I have
> tested the changes in our test environment containing a couple of monitored
> clients and it works great! However I am hesitant to patch our production
> environment until I can get some reassurance that the Hobbit Monitoring wont
> crash a week or two later because of my poor coding. For easier reading, I have
> pasted a copy of the difference file between my modified version of the bbwin.c
> and the bbwin.patch release version below.
>
>

My apologizes for the delay of the answer. You are right. The problem
comes from the spaces in the column name.
The easiest thing to do is to change the code in BBWin. I will report
the name column with no space so you can match it.

I will replace spaces in the service name with underscores for BBWin
0.12. Check for the next release of BBWin and let me know if you still
have issues.

Regards,

-- 
Etienne GRIGNON