[hobbit] Current development plans

[Deal, Richard]

I monitor over 340 hosts of various different architectures etc with no
problems.  bb/bin and bb/tmp are local but bb/etc and bb/ext are nfs
mounted on clients.  Yes I have a different set for each arch.

"are relying on your network + NFS for the monitoring system"
BB and Hobbit kind of need the network
Besides I monitor the NFS servers as well.  IF they go down in any way
we are alerted from their tests. Besides if the NFS servers go down the
clients will not be able to do very much at all.  

I use primarily one script for most of my SNMP testing, bb-xsnmp.pl.  
It is not perfect but does test quite a bit of different hardware,
routers, switches, Netapps, APC UPS.

As I mentioned I don't have any problem with authentication/encryption
as long as it does not make scripts more difficult and is optional.
Many sites would have no reason to encrypt BB data as it is generally
non critical information and travels over secure networks at most
locations.  Authentication is more widely useful but should not be set
up so that it is overly burdensome to use.  Timing is very critical as
well, most people do not want to purchase a large machine just to be
able to decrypt/authenticate their monitoring messages in time.  


-----Original Message-----
From: Adam Goryachev [mailto:adam at websitemanagers.com.au] 
Sent: Thursday, June 09, 2005 8:43 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: RE: [hobbit] Current development plans

On Thu, 2005-06-09 at 08:26 -0400, Deal, Richard wrote:
> I would really like to have the option of a client on the unix world.

> Having a central machine poll all of the clients constantly a far less
> distributed system than running remote clients.  I prefer a locally
run
> client from an NFS mounted area were I can centrally control each with
> the config files.

This can work if all your machines are the same architecture and library
versions etc, but it soon falls apart. Also you are relying on your
network + NFS for the monitoring system to actually work, which isn't a
good presumtion.

For little extra work, you can simply push out the config files/etc via
some ssh/scripting.... 

> I agree, on the snmp situation, BB/Hobbits strengths are in scripts
and
> ext's snmp should be an ext to Hobbit.  

Well, why couldn't this be core to hobbit, just as http network tests,
or fping etc... You need a fairly complex/flexible config file to be
able to specify enough SNMP values to monitor, and which values are
good/ok/bad, etc, but I wouldn't see the need for writing multiple
scripts for each and every snmp device you want to monitor like we have
at the moment (apc UPS/cisco routers/etc...)

> My only concern about changing the BB protocols would be to make it
> optional and not to make adding EXT scripts more difficult.

Actually, thinking about this for a few seconds, it should only require
changes to the bb (client exe file) and bbd (server exe file) and all
other scripts would stay the same. bbd would have some config variable
which says either ignore un-encrypted msgs, accept both, or accept only
un-encrypted. Then the client would be configured for either send
encrypted/send plain. Finally, the server would 'detect' wether the
client is sending encrypted message or plain text, and if encrypted,
would decrypt it, and pass it to itself as per normal for processing (or
discard it if it is invalid/not permitted).

One drawback I see in the BB protocol is that there is no client/server
method to see any 'version' of each other, so they can't negotiate these
things very well.

Just my 0.02c worth

Regards,
Adam


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