big brother replacement

[Sloan]

Hello list,

It's that time of year again - we're looking for alternatives to our
aging bb infrastructure - although it's been helped by the bbgen
extensions, it is showing it's age, and is getting harder to support as
time goes by.

Of all the potential replacements we've looked at, I don't really like
any of them - the commercial bb stuff is uninspiring, and their linux
support is lacking. The other solutions tend to be heavyweight j2ee and
database apps, or oddities like nagios. What I'd really love to find is
something like an up-to-date version of big brother+bbgen, something
like hobbit.

Unfortunately, last I checked, hobbit still lacked a crucial capability
that we depend on, the built-in bb failover mechanism. We have 2 data
centers, several hundred miles apart, with bb servers in several lans at
both sites. Each bb server has a twin at the other location, and they
both monitor the servers in both data centers, but only one of the bb
servers does reporting, as determined by the failover state. The bb
failover has worked marvelously, and has kept bb firmly in place so far,
despite the other advantages of hobbit.

So, the $64 question: Is there anything in hobbit, or on the horizon,
which will allow hobbit to serve as a drop-in replacement for bb,
including the failover capability?

Thanks for your words of wisdom.

Joe