Some thoughts on clustered hobbit

[Kauffman, Tom]

First, let me express my thanks to Brian for putting this document
together and allowing Henrik to distribute it! I've a lot of experience
with IBM's HACMP for AIX, and getting a clustered configuration working
as desired is not a trivial procedure.

Henrik -- check me on this: it's my impression we no longer need a
'BBPAGER' entry on the client-side bb-hosts because the hobbit server
passes all potentially alertable statuses to hobbit-alert and it decides
if an alert is really required.

Brian -- no offense, but I would rather categorise your configuration as
"active/inactive". I'm looking at doing an "active/passive" cluster when
time frees up -- about a month from now. The difference? I'm running two
hobbit/apache instances all the time -- but the 'passive' (fallover)
side is not doing alerting or network tests. It does build displays
(it's my technical documentation server as well) and it does keep both
history and rrd data updated. Both hosts show up on the client side as
'BBDISPLAY'. On failover it will take over the IP address for the hobbit
display and re-launch hobbit with network testing and alerting enabled.

Depending on host count and test count, this might be a bad idea -- but
we've only got about 300 entries in bb-hosts. 

So -- thanks ever so much, again, for providing this -- it will make my
life ever so much easier next month when I get the time to automate the
failover environment.

Tom

Tom Kauffman
NIBCO, Inc