I am again being bitten by regex problems. I am able to reproduce it
with the following entries in hobbit-alerts.cfg:
$IGNORE_HOSTS=%prod-web-(1|2|3|4|9|10|11)$
HOST=$IGNORE_HOSTS service=*
IGNORE
If I then check the "info" column of a host that is *not* supposed to
be ignored, such as prod-web-12. It shows that it is indeed ignored.
This is a serious problem as I have already missed alerts for some
production hosts because of this problem.
According to pcretest (Henriks recommended method of testing a Hobbit
regex), there is nothing wrong with the regular expression that I am
using:
$ pcretest
PCRE version 6.6 06-Feb-2006
re> /prod-web-(1|2|3|4|9|10|11)$/
data> prod-web-12 (*correctly not matching*)
No match
data> prod-web-19 (*correctly not matching*)
No match
data> prod-web-10 (*correctly matching*)
0: prod-web-10
1: 10
From the above tests you can see that prod-web-12 does not match the
regex when using pcretest, yet Hobbit is matching it for some reason.
A possible work-around could be to not use a regex at all, such as
$IGNORE_HOSTS=prod-web-1,prod-web-2,prod-web-3... but that is not
really a solution if you have hundreds of hosts, and my main point is
that regular expressions are not working as they are documented.
I've also tried other undocumented ways of using the regex, including:
No hosts matched at all
$IGNORE_HOSTS=%prod-web-(1|2|3|4|9|10|11)$
HOST="IGNORE_HOSTS"
No hosts matched at all
$IGNORE_HOSTS="%prod-web-(1|2|3|4|9|10|11)$"
HOST=$IGNORE_HOSTS
All hosts match (both web-12 and web-11)
$IGNORE_HOSTS=prod-web-(1|2|3|4|9|10|11)$
HOST=%$IGNORE_HOSTS
If anyone else can verify or reproduce this, it would be helpful in at
least convincing Henrik to add it to the list of things to fix in the
next version. I honestly hope that it's not a problem with Hobbit and
instead something I am doing wrong - if so please enlighten me.
-Charles