[Xymon] New remote summaries fail with "Invalid new testname" with at least 4.3.27

[Japheth Cleaver]

On 8/3/2016 7:19 AM, Axel Beckert wrote:
> Hi,
>
> we have a few scripts which generate their own web page and only send
> summaries to the Xymon server. In the past, these messages worked and
> looked like this:
>
>    summary summary.mac.$vlan $topcolor http://$myname/mac/$vlan.html $date
>
> "mac" showed up as row/hostname and $vlan showed up as column/test.
>
> With not yet received values for $vlan, we get "Bogus message from …:
> Invalid new testname: 'mac.dc2552'" error messages in the display of
> the xymond test.
>
> According to the xymond/xymond.c source code at line 620, that format
> (especially "summary summary" seems expected.
>
> But then again, if I look at the line generating that error message
> (line 1254 in the same file), it seems that dots are no more allowed
> in test names. (Existing ones are still allowed, probably in line
> 1251, and hence do not generate these errors and show up.)
>
> So I tried to send messages of the format
>
>    summary mac.$vlan $topcolor http://$myname/mac/$vlan.html $date
>
> But now the Remote Status Display table vanished completely from
> nongreen.html and I get "Hostname 'mac' in tree, but no host-info"
> warnings in the display of the xymond test.
>
> So I reverted that change and now the Remote Status Display table is
> back, but so are the "Invalid new testname" errors.
>
> Is this a recent regression? (I found mails on this list about if
> summaries really have been fixed in 4.3.20, but without much details.)
>
> Or am I missing something? Has the format of these messages become
> stricter on purpose? If so, where are they documented? The "SENDING
> SUMMARIES TO REMOTE XYMON SERVERS" section in hosts.cfg(5) seems to be
> about "summary" items inside hosts.cfg, not about the syntax of the
> summary messages.
>
> 		Kind regards, Axel Beckert

Hi Axel,

I believe this is a side-effect of 
https://sourceforge.net/p/xymon/code/7901/ , which tightened rules on 
both hostnames and test names. It was documented in the release notes as 
that, but didn't mention summaries at all.

I think you're right in that the tightened rules are hitting the 
otherwise-unusual "summary summary.host.test" incorrectly, which is 
what's expected (and what is generated by xymongen and everything 
else)... We ingest the entire hostsvc here and store it as the testname, 
which gets booted out.

Testing a fix now.

Regards,
-jc