[hobbit] FYI: Howto on Configuring Hobbit to Send Alerts via SMS over Skype under Linux

[Matthew Marlowe]

>why don't you use a GSM modem connected directly to your Hobbit server?
>Then you can use a software SMS-Gateway like kannel and send out your
>critical alerts via SMS.

Our hobbit server is not running on physical hardware.  It's a virtual
machine within a cluster.

At any one point, the VM is running on whatever node the cluster manager has
decided it will run best on.  That computation is performed every five
minutes (if I remember right).  Our cluster isn't heavily loaded, so the VM
doesn't move around more than once every few weeks - but, that still means
that if I wanted to use a physical cellular modem, I'd have to install one
on each node in the cluster or get one of those new shiny cluster i/o
aggregation devices which would be cost prohibitive.

We decided to virtualize hobbit for several reasons:
a) Our network is not so large that we needed a dedicated server for hobbit
performance.
b) We're paying Southern California rates for power, so dedicated physical
servers are kept to a minimum.
c) We actually find apps running on our clusters to be more reliable and
less maintenance than those running on physical boxes -- and, we like hobbit
to be up all the time.
d) We have a lot more spare computing/network capacity in our cluster than
we have anywhere else.
e) When making major changes to hobbit, we can just snapshot the VM before
hand and if all goes to hell, we can just restore the VM snapshot to return
all to working order.

Honestly, other than the SMS hardware issue, we haven't had any problems at
all running Hobbit under VMware ESX.

We do have a 2nd outside-the-network monitoring system that double checks
critical systems, hobbit status, and cluster status, but we'd be running
that anyways regardless of whether hobbit was virtualized.