[hobbit] Question/feature request

[Eric van de Meerakker]

Hi Henrik,


I don't know if you read my previous response (see below), because it
got sent using the wrong mail account. But I think I've found another
issue: does the network retest procedure after a failed test ignore the
"expect" setting in bb-services?

I tried to do some testing by deliberatly misconfiguring the expect
setting for the FTP test (I set it to 221 in stead of 220), and now I
have got a cyclical behaviour on the Hobbit server: it will turn all
(five) FTP service tests yellow on the next test, but within a minute
they all turn green again. Again five minutes later they turn yellow
again, back green within a minute, etc. etc. This continues to happen
until I put the expect 220 back in bb-services...

I don't think this is the correct behaviour?


Regards,

Eric.

> Hi Henrik,
> 
> 
> You're right, at least partially. I found out just now that the issue
> was with a misconfigured nsswitch.conf on the FTP server. That file
> still had entries for nis and nisplus in it, whicht caused the FTP
> banner response to be very slow (just about the length of the network
> test timeout I guess :-), due to the hostname lookup. The TCP connection
> would be established quickly, but the FTP banner didn't always appear in
> time.
> 
> But the weird thing is that some green FTP statuses (especially those
> following the yellow ones in the history) don't contain any response
> string either?!?
> 
> I only saw those FTP statuses at first and they made me try to put in
> some debugging code to get the actual response on the web page, directly
> behind the "Unexpected service response" text. My first attempt crashed
> the bbtest-net executable the next time the failure occured (exactly
> because there was no response, so I rewrote it to catch that and put in
> an explicit "(null)" text when no data was received), but in the
> meantime I found the cause of the issue.
> 
> Also, the "Seconds: N.NN" reported seems to be the time in which the TCP
> connection to the FTP server was established, not the total test time.
> That makes sense I suppose for the TCP timing statistics, but it threw
> me off-track in finding the solution for this problem. A yellow FTP
> status with 0.12 seconds duration did not indicate a timeout to me ;-)
> 
> BTW, I'm testing this on the 4.2 beta release with recent patches. I'm
> in the process of installing a new Hobbit server in our remote
> datacenter to monitor the production systems locally, so we won't
> experience Internet outages as downtime for our services (we're already
> running Hobbit remotely on two oldish servers from two remote offices,
> outages in ADSL connections in reporting actual service downtime to our
> customers). Alerts from the datacenter will go out through SMS. We're
> very happy with Hobbit so far!
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Eric.
> 
> 
> Henrik Stoerner wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 11:37:17AM +0200, Eric van de Meerakker (Mailings Lists) wrote:
>>> I have a question on Hobbit: how can I find out what the exact
>>> "Unexpected service response" is on a network test? I have an FTP test
>>> that fails momentarily for (to me) mysterious reasons... Would it be
>>> possible to put the actual value of the unexpected service response in
>>> the error message?
>> 
>> It does that already, actually. If you don't see anything on the status
>> page, it is because no data was received from the server. (And "no data"
>> obviously doesn't match the "200" status we expect from an ftp server).
>> 
>> 
>> Regards,
>> Henrik
>> 
>> 
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