Hobbit Communication Protocol

[Charles Jones <jonescr (at) cisco.com>]

Henrik,

I was thinking of writing a perl implementation of a mail-ack gateway 
for Hobbit. I know bb-mailack.sh exists, but it has to be modified to 
work with hobbit, and I would also like to have the ability to not only 
ack an alert but to enable/disable hosts via email as well.

That being said, I also would like to have my script totally self 
contained, and not rely on any external binaries or having to source 
external shell environments.  So I was wondering if you had documented 
anywhere the protocol hobbit uses to communicate - in other words, what 
I need to do to emulate "./bb hobbitserver hobbitcommand".

I can probably figure it out myself by going through the source, but I 
have a feeling you have it documented, or that its something simple 
enough to reply with :-)

The end result will be a hobbit-mailack.pl script that will be a 
standalone mail gateway for hobbit which can be called from .forward, 
/etc/aliases, .qmail, or whatever other method ones MTA might provide 
for piping email through a script.

Options I intend to include are:
* Logging of the gateway usage
* Ability to ack an alert
* Ability to enable or disable a host
* Simple configuration

Speaking of this, I think it would be helpful if when a service is in 
alert status, that there was an easy way to ack the alert from the web 
page *without knowing what the alert ID is*. Something like an 
"acknowledge *this* alert" (w/ same password protection as admin area) 
button right smack next to the history button :-)  People that I am 
teaching to use hobbit have commented that they find it inefficient to 
have to go through their email to find the last alert ID for a service, 
and cut and paste it into hobbit to ack an alert.

-Charles