[Xymon] xymon as a drop-in bb replacement

[John Thurston]

On 3/18/2013 11:04 AM, Sean MacGuire wrote:
> John Thurston wrote:
>> We ran BB 1.9 for years, then switched to BBPE about three years ago.
>> Earlier this month, Quest announced end-of-life for BBPE so we're
>> looking at our options.
>>
>> We have fewer than 500 clients reporting into Big Brother. But
>> swapping them out for something else is going to painful and take
>> time. If a xymon server will happily accept bb-client messages, then I
>> could stand up a xymon server and replace clients through attrition.
>>
>> Has anyone else recently gone down this path?
>
> If anyone on here is old enough - they might recognize me as the
> original author of BB.

Yes, Sean. Thank you! We've been running bb since 1998 or 99.
Does that make me old?

> That having been said, I recommend moving to Xymon, and would
> be happy to help any BBPE users in any way I can.

Well, it was a little bit of a battle, but I got Xymon built and running 
on a Solaris zone. This is a thing of beauty.

I grabbed my bb-hosts file, pulled my BBDISPLAY lines out, and threw it 
at the Xymon server. We're rocking and rolling :)
A few things I notice are:

   Our BB configuration pre-dates FQDN support, so my bb-hosts file has 
only hostnames in it. I'll either need to disable FQDN on Xymon or 
insert "testip" all over my hosts.cfg. I'll probably do the latter 
because I think it is finally time to embrace fqdn.

   I didn't import any of my ext-scripts or customizations and I see 
Xymon now natively supports a few things I had rolled on my own.

   I've thrown a BBRELAY line in one of my production BB servers, and it 
works like a champ.

One thing I'm missing, though, is the equivalent of the searchable 
web-help we have with BBPE. I see all of the help files and I can grep 
them, but is there a slicker way to find things in them from the web 
interface?

-- 
    Do things because you should, not just because you can.

John Thurston    907-465-8591
John.Thurston at alaska.gov
Enterprise Technology Services
Department of Administration
State of Alaska