[Xymon] IP address in bb-host file

[Mike Cavanagh]

Henrik,
Thanks for the reply
Mike


-----Original Message-----
From: xymon-bounces at xymon.com [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf
Of henrik at hswn.dk
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2012 1:01 AM
To: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] IP address in bb-host file

On Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:30:34 -0800, "Mike Cavanagh"
<mike at terrapintesting.com> wrote:
> Please comment on pros/cons to using 0.0.0.0 for "all" hosts vs. the 
> actual IP address in the bb-hosts file?
> I see I can use 0.0.0.0 for an IP and Xymon will lookup the IP
address.

Xymon will do a DNS lookup on the hostname, unless you explicitly use
the "testip" tag on a host.

The presence of an IP in the hosts.cfg / bb-hosts file is a remnant from
the days when Xymon was an add-on to the "Big Brother" system - this
system relied on the IP in the bb-hosts file for network testing.
Although Xymon has evolved a lot, it has retained much of the
configuration file format from the Big Brother days, including this.

Currently, the only advantage of having the IP in the bb-hosts file is
that this will be used as a "fall-back" IP in case the DNS lookup fails.
So there really is no problem in just having "0.0.0.0" as the IP.

I have some plans to re-do the configuration system for Xymon v5, and
one of the changes that will happen is probably that the mandatory
IP-address in hosts.cfg will disappear, so you only need to specify it
when it will actually be used.


Regards,
Henrik

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