[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [hobbit] A combo message of questions

Henrik Storner wrote:

1. Is there any way to define the amount of space put between displayed groups? When I use several group-compress sections in bb-hosts, hobbit renders the page with a rather large amount (seems like 6+ lines) of blank space between them. I have lots of hosts and want to get as many of them on the page as I can.



Each group goes into a HTML "table", and there is currently two
"<br>" tags between each table. This is not configurable, the layout
of the page is deeply embedded in the bbdisplay/pagegen.c code.

(Which is annoying, because it ought to be easy to modify the layout
of the webpages. But that's another story).

Two "<br>" tags might be a bit much. I've dropped one of them in the
next version, let me know if you think that's better.


Great, I look forward to trying it out....any rough ETA on the next version?

2. It would be nice to be able to use regular expressions in the "expect" option of bb-services. For instance I want to check the status of several IRC servers, and they all have different output in response to telnetting to them, but they all have the word "NOTICE", I would like to be able to do something like: expect ".*NOTICE.*", so that I could use one check for multiple servers.



OK, not terribly difficult to do, and it would make sense to use regex'es throughout (you can do it with the http content checks).


That would be great, and I agree it would make sense to use regex's everywhere possible.

3. Whenever I use the "apache" keyword in bb-hosts, it crashes hobbit, and subsequently everything turns purple. I made sure the host I had specified had the server-status option configured and enabled. I would happily provide dumps and do any troubleshooting you need, as I would really like to have the apache performance graphs.



I'd like to know exactly which program is crashing. I suppose it's the
bbtest-net tool which is the one that performs the "apache" test - if
it crashes, then all of your network tests should go purple. Does it
work any better if instead of the "apache" keyword you define an http
content check like this:

  1.2.3.4 www.foo.com # cont=apache;http://1.2.3.4/server-status?auto;.

This should give the same result.


Yes it was bbtest-net that was crashing. I tried your method above and it seems to be working, perhaps I was specifying wrong options before when I used the apache directive, I simply added "apache" keyword, was I supposed to give the full URL as well like above? From the man page it seemed like all you needed was "apache". I can use your workaround for now. Can you tell me how to enable the other apache graphs (apache1, apache2, apache3) to show on that page as well?

4. Is there any way to put a header OVER a displayed group-compress? Any text you specify next to group-compress gets put in the column over the hostnames, Is it possible to have an option to have that text go centered over the entire group (over the column headers)?



Yes, like this:

title All of my Web servers
group-compress Extranet servers
...
group-compress Intranet servers
...

See the description of the "title" tag in the bb-hosts(5) manpage.


That worked...thanks :-)

5. What rules does hobbit follow for looking up hostnames?



1) If there's a "testip" tag on the host entry in bb-hosts, it uses
  the IP-address from the bb-hosts file.
2) Hostname lookup (either /etc/hosts or DNS)
3) If lookup fails, use IP-address from bb-hosts

See the description of the bbtest-net "--dns" option. This is slightly
different from Big Brother, which uses the bb-hosts IP for ping-tests,
but hostnames for TCP tests.


I added the "testip" tag and that did the trick...thanks!

6. bb-services has an option to give a service multiple names. It would be nice to be able to define multiple ports as well, or even better by specifying them in bb-hosts.



You can. If you want to check ssh on port 8022, put "ssh:8022" in the
bb-hosts file. bb-services just defines the default port.


Ah cool...I thought you could only do that with /etc/services services, I didnt know you could override the port of a bb-services service. Nice :-)

For example if I want to check an IRC server, it is easy to create an
irc service in bb-services, but if I want to check multiple ports of
the same service on the same hosts, I would have to make multiple
service definitions. How about being able to define a service, and
have some keyword for port that indicates the port(s) are passed from
bb-hosts, and then in bb-hosts you would specify the port,
ie. "1.2.3.4 irc.bar.com # conn irc:6667 irc:6668 irc:6669"



OK, this is a bit more complicated because it would require bbtest-net
to merge the results of those three tests into one status-message.
That is not being done for simple TCP tests, only for http tests
currently. Right now, You'll have to set these up as individual
columns.


What will happen if I do irc:6667 irc:6668? I assume it will only display the output of the last one, but will it still check them all? As long as it checks them all and sends alerts I could deal with it not displaying the banner output of every port.

7. Do you accept donations via PayPal? I would like to send you a donation for all your hard work. :-)



No, but I do have a wishlist at amazon.co.uk - just search for my
name "Henrik Stoerner" on their wishlist page.


Cool...I will hook you up!  Thanks for answering my questions so quickly.

-Charles