[hobbit] Questions about migrating from BB

[Ryan Novosielski]

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Buchan Milne wrote:
> ----- "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').

Have you been able to find in writing anyplace that the hostname is
supposed to be the FQDN? I haven't been able to, and I've seen a lot of
references to the short name belonging in /etc/hostname.<if> and
/etc/nodename. Most OS' separate hostname and domain name out, but it
would seem that using the FQDN would at least fix the problems that
require me to use CLIENT: on Solaris machines in my setup.

>> 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.

OK, this makes a huge difference. Note that even the description is
written to re-inforce that these both should be the same value:

# The hostname of your server
# The IP-address of your server. Use the real one, not 127.0.0.1 .

...assuming that "your server"="your server", as well as the fact that
both say BBSERVER*=BBSERVER*. That is one thing that I'd alluded to
earlier: the terminology that BB uses to call the BBDISPLAY machine and
the BBNET machine make it clear what to put in the various config
options. If they both reside on the same machine, it's obvious what to
do, as opposed to the reverse (if they both say one machine and you've
got two).

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

Should be fairly simple documentation patches. I'm no programmer, but if
that's necessary, I should be able to handle some of it.

>> 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).

Thrilled to stand corrected. The changes I've made so far have made a
difference. I guess we'll see going forward if I run into anything else.
I'm running 4.2.3 incidentally, so I suppose it's possible that the
latest changes are not in my version if any have been made.

- --
 ---- _  _ _  _ ___  _  _  _
 |Y#| |  | |\/| |  \ |\ |  | |Ryan Novosielski - Systems Programmer II
 |$&| |__| |  | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922)
 \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST - NJMS Medical Science Bldg - C630
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