[Xymon] problem with receiving bbwin data

Wed Jul 10 14:49:12 CEST 2013

If the eventlog data being transmitted is too large to transmit until the clientlocal.cfg is sent back and populated in BBWin, then why not disable the eventlog client in BBWin until it successfully sends 2-3 status messages?  By that time the clientlocal.cfg will be populated on the client and you can enable the eventlog reader again and everything should work fine.

Scot Kreienkamp

From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of David Baldwin
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2013 4:19 AM
To: Phil Crooker
Cc: xymon at xymon.com
Subject: Re: [Xymon] problem with receiving bbwin data

Phil,

Just found a fix that works for me :)
I've been having difficulties setting up the bbwin client (ver 0.13 going to xymon 4.3.10 server) running on win7 sp1, 2008r2 and win2012 boxes in central mode. I've had zero response from the bbwin-help forum for this, so please bear with me.

For background: I can't get the bbwin client to stop sending all the logs, it ignores any maxdata parameters I use. Eg:

     eventlog:system:1024

It sends everything anyway. If I use log:system:1024, the bbwin client throws an error that it can't find the system log file. It does find the file without the maxdata parameter.

One problem with the settings in client-local.cfg on the xymon server is that they only propagate to the client after a successful sending of a client message. The mechanics is that after the client message has been sent, BBWin does a shutdown on the write socket and then reads from the read socket until EOF. If the write socket is never shutdown because the server breaks the connection due to flooding, then the client-local.cfg section will never be sent to the client.

I've previously attempted to manually create C:\Program Files(x86)\BBWin\tmp\clientlocal.cfg to trick it, but with limited success. Just played around with it again - with client reporting to my primary server I just got it going - previously I was reporting to 2 servers. The trick seems to be in having logfetch.status also created. I then modified my BBWin.cfg back to 2 servers and it broke again. Maybe the 2nd server is responding differently. It is undefined which server's clientlocal.cfg to believe anyway :) Swapped the order of the servers around and it seems stable.

If the server just discarded all the flooding data beyond MAXMSG_* and then returned the client config section anyway maybe it could be made to work, but there may be good reasons why that would not be sensible.
This aside, I do need to get this working as I have to start monitoring 10 new windows servers and have to monitor the event logs, so I can't just stop sending them as has been suggested. Yes I could do some powershell scripts and send them via bbwincmd but the bbwin client is made for this task.....

So, looking at this from the other side, the xymon server appears to be resetting the session after about 22MB of data has been sent (I know, this is ludicrous, but it is windows). Nothing in the xymond logs (except for the occasional data flooding error ("1st line client", always)); on the client side it reports it can't send the data to the xymon server.

Depending on what auditting you have enabled, 22MB is very easy to achieve! Turn on Security event logging including success and failure and it's almost guaranteed :)

David.

I've set the MAXMSG_* to quite silly levels:

# ipcs
------ Shared Memory Segments --------
key               shmid         owner      perms      bytes      nattch     status
0x01034be7 16908288   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x02034be7 16941057   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x03034be7 16973826   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x04034be7 17006595   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x05034be7 17039364   xymon      600        262144     1
0x06034be7 17072133   xymon      600        32768      1
0x07034be7 17104902   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x08034be7 17137671   xymon      600        102400000  2
0x09034be7 17170440   xymon      600        131072     1

Anything up to and including this size has no effect on the problem.

Looking at the tcpdump stream, the bbwin client sends data normally with regular ACKs from xymond till around that 22MB mark then xymond responds with a FIN packet, then with RST packets and the session shuts down. Nothing in the packets themselves indicate what the problem is.

If anyone can help with this, please, it would be great.

thanks, Phil

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