[hobbit] Questions about migrating from BB

[Buchan Milne]

----- "Ryan Novosielski" <novosirj at umdnj.edu> wrote:

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> Greg Hubbard wrote:
> > The CLIENT tag is used to tell the Xymon server how the incoming
> client
> > data will be tagged.  You use this when your Xymon agent and the
> Xymon
> > server do not agree on which name to use -- usually because one of
> the
> > entries has FQDN and the other does not.  This is the "cheap fix"
> for
> > "ghost" clients -- see the ghost report.
> 
> That's what I figured. On Solaris, it seems I run into this on all of
> the hosts. uname -n always seems to return a short name. In fact, it
> does not appear as if Solaris has much of a concept of a domain name,


bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com > uname -n
merga.ourdomain.com
bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com > hostname
merga.telkomsa.net
bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com > uname -a
SunOS merga.ourdomain.com 5.9 Generic_117171-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V210

(Of course, don't try 'hostname -d').

> and I can't figure if I'm supposed to keep the full name as the
> hostname
> or not. Hasn't seemed to matter.
> 
> > Some of the columns you are talking about (bbgen, hobbitd, etc.)
> are
> > implicit tests that are run no matter what on the Xymon server. 
> Xymon
> > inherits a lot of the BB communications architecture but extends it
> in
> > many ways.  The BBDISPLAY machine(s) will have "bbgen" tests -- this
> is
> > what creates the Web pages.  The Xymon server will have the
> "hobbitd"
> > test -- this is what processes incoming data from Xymon clients. 
> BBNET
> > machines will have the "bbtest" column -- this shows how network
> tests
> > are working.
> 
> They were missing, but apparently what happened is that at least the
> "bbgen" tests were going into the bit running with a misspelled name,
> so
> at least I know what is going on with them now. I guess these are
> "client" tests on a Xymon server.
> 
> > On a simple environment (the only kind I know) you will have all
> three
> > of these on your Xymon server and not on anything else.  My *guess*
> is
> > that if you know how to break up BBDISPLY and BBNET you might see
> > different tests associated with each host.
> 
> Apparently not, and in my opinion, this is somewhat broken, unless
> I'm
> misconfiguring something. Xymon appears to only have one notion of a
> "server." If you're running a network test machine, it asks you for
> your
> server name (example pasted):
> 
> BBSERVERHOSTNAME="xymon.umdnj.edu"              # The hostname of
> your
> server
> BBSERVERIP="130.219.34.102"                     # The IP-address of
> your
> server. Use the real one, not 127.0.0.1 .
> BBSERVEROS="sunos"                      # The operating system of
> your
> server. linux,freebsd,solaris,hpux,aix,osf
> 
> The "bbtest" test, with a solely "BBNET" machine configured this way,
> appears as if it comes from the "BBNET" machine (status message
> received
> from IP is the "BBNET" machine), but the test shows up under whatever
> server name is defined in those above variables in hobbitserver.cfg.

You only set *one* of those, BBSERVERHOSTNAME, which it uses in the status message, which it sends to BBSERVERIP.

See e.g. line 2321 of bbnet/bbtest-net.c
                sprintf(msgline, "status %s.%s %s %s\n\n", xgetenv("MACHINE"), egocolumn, colorname(color), timestamp);

(In lib/environ.c, MACHINE is created from MACHINEDOTS if MACHINE does not exist, and by default MACHINEDOTS=$BBSERVERHOSTNAME in hobbitserver.cfg).

I guess the descriptions of BBSERVERHOSTNAME and BBSERVERIP could be improved in hobbitserver.cfg and hobbitserver.cfg(5), and BBSERVERHOSTNAME could possibly default to the machine's hostname instead ...

BBSERVERHOSTNAME is the name of the host running that instance of xymon as you would like it to be displayed in any messages about the xymon processes, and BBSEVERIP is the IP of the Xymon server (hobbitd or bbproxy) to which all status messages should be sent.

I might be able to fix some of these issues in future.

> If
> you set that server name to the name of the BBNET machine, as I
> expected
> I was supposed to do initially, you get "connection refused" errors,
> as
> it tries to connect to itself and cannot as it's not running the
> server
> component that listens on the port.
> 
> I'm starting to believe that while you CAN separate the BBNET and
> BBDISPLAY nodes with Xymon, no one is really doing it and it doesn't
> work that cleanly.

I've been doing it since hobbit-4.1.0, and I have had no problems (with more complex setups including bbproxy to have a staged migration from bb).

Regards,
Buchan