[hobbit] Re: purple/clear problems?!

[Henrik Storner]

In <75A84995-A8AF-4A9D-8FD5-72B6F191A1D9 at gmail.com> Gee Pee <peter.welter at gmail.com> writes:


>Op 5-jul-2005, om 17:59 heeft Henrik Stoerner het volgende geschreven:

>> Are you running the BBDISPLAY part of Big Brother ? That could explain
>> the purples, because a BBDISPLAY server will send out status messages
>> to change a color to purple - Hobbit doesn't, that's handled  
>> internally
>> in the hobbit daemon.

>Yes, the Hobbit server gets its data from the BBDISPLAY BB-server,  
>using the BBRELAY-option.

>But I do not completely understand the bouncing effect?

The original bb-display.sh script - and my bbgen package, if you happen
to use that - generates purple status messages as part of updating the
webpages.

Hobbit does this differently: Statuses change to purple "automatically"
inside the Hobbit daemon. When Hobbit checks for this, it will first look
at the "ping" test, and if this indicates that the host is down, it will
change the tests to go "clear" instead of purple.

So I think what happens is this:

* you originally (while the host was up) received status messages for
  ping, cpu, disk, msgs and perhaps some other tests.
* The host goes down. The ping test changes to red, and the cpu, disk
  etc. local tests are no longer updated.
* After 30 minutes the lifetime of the cpu etc. tests expires. Hobbit
  notices this but also sees that the ping-test is red, so it changes
  status to clear.
* On your BBDISPLAY server, the web update now runs. It also sees these
  tests as having expired, so it generates a purple status-update which
  it forwards (because of BBRELAY) to the Hobbit server. Hobbit handles
  this as any other status message and changes the status to purple.
* Shortly after Hobbit again scans for messages that have expired, finds
  these tests again and changes them to clear because the "ping" test is
  still red.
* After 5 minutes, the BBDISPLAY server again updates the webpages, sees
  these tests as having expired, and generate a new purple status message
  which it forwards to the Hobbit server. Status goes purple.
* etc. ad infinitum.

One could argue that Hobbit should ignore it when a status message is 
received which is "purple" (because that should never happen - this color
should only be triggered internally in Hobbit). I'll add a check for this.


Regards,
Henrik