[hobbit] big brother replacement

[Sloan]

Deiss, Mark wrote:
>
> For a vanilla BB environment, you can have multiple BBDISPLAY entities
> but the recommendation is that there is only one BBNET entity. A BBNET
> server that is generating the pings out to the clients will be sending
> the ping results to all of the BBDISPLAY entities (as defined on the
> BBNET host). If you have multiple BBNET entities that ping the same
> servers, you will be sending duplicated results as far as the
> individual BBDISPLAY servers are concerned (the connection messages
> will be renamed to the host being pinged). To support multiple BBNETs
> in a non-race environment requires additional coding to carefully
> direct the BBNET results to not trip over each other. The default
> behavior is to pump them out to whatever BBDISPLAY is listed - you get
> the race conditions when you want all the BBDISPLAY servers to monitor
> all of the BBNET hosts (i.e. want BBNET to send their client-side
> tests to the BBDISPLAY entities - this will result in the BBNET poll
> messages going out to all the BBDISPLAY entities also).
>

Interestingly enough, we've been running redundant bb servers for each
lan, without any concern for race conditions and while that has it's own
peculiar behavior in corner cases, we've never seen any sort of real,
intractable problems with it. The general consensus here is that
redundancy is good, except for the notifications - we don't want to be
notified twice for every incident, thus the so-called bb "failover"
capability saves us that annoyance with no extra hacks required.

I probably made it sound a lot more sophisticated than it really is - we
really just have active/active BBNET/BBDISPLAY servers, with the
delegation of BBPAGER decided by the failover status.

It looks like Henrik has a good roadmap to get there in 4.3 from what I
read here, so hopefully we've got our bb replacement at last. The only
other concern is that we copy all bb notifications as snmp traps to
netcool, but it looks as though that should be with a hobbit plugin.

Joe