Long question about BB clients and HOBBIT clients

[Bill Benedetto]

Good day.

I'm a long-time BB user.  About 18 months ago I switched my BB
server to Hobbit/Xymon.  Everything has worked shwell.... until
recently, of course.  Hence this email.

There was a thread recently about screen-scraping the
SERVICE=info webpage to get the OS off of it.  That seemed pretty
useful/cool to me so I tried it.  However, my SERVICE=info
webpage doesn't have the OS on it.

More nosing around led me to the hobbitdboard command although it
did take me quite awhile to figure out how to use hobbitdboard.
I was somewhat dismayed to finally figure out how to use
hobbitdboard just to discover that when I did this command:

 % .../bb 127.0.0.1 "hobbitdboard test=info fields=hostname,BBH_OS"

that there was no BBH_OS field available.  (Or maybe it was
available but empty...?)

Anyhoo, I somehow figured out (I no longer remember HOW I figured
this out) that I could modify one of my BB client scripts to do
this:

  $BB $BBDISP "client `$UNAME -n`.`$UNAME`"

which pretty much seems to work.  I can now do the aforementioned
hobbitdboard command and get the OS returned.  Cool stuff.

*HOWEVER*, I noticed 2 side effects of this.  The first side
effect being that the SERVICE=info webpage doesn't seem to have
ANYTHING on it now.  I not only don't get the OS, the page is
blank (or maybe there's some error somewhere in the pipeline
now?).

You might not think that this is connected to my change, but I
haven't added the
  $BB $BBDISP "client `$UNAME -n`.`$UNAME`" 
command to all of my clients.  And only the ones that have that
addition also now have the blank/borken SERVICE=info webpage.

The second side effect is much more impressive and the real
reason for my email today.  Since implementing my addition to
most of my BB clients, I now get 2 MSGS reports from each of
those clients every update period.  So every 5 minutes I get 2
MSGS reports.  One is green and says something like this:

  Wed Dec 10 11:27:32 EST 2008 No bad messages

  Status unchanged in 0.00 minutes

  Status message received from YOUR_UP_HERE_PAL

The other report is clear and looks something like this:

  System logs at  : No log data available

  The client did not report any logfile data

Of course, since I'm getting two different colors every polling
period, that means that I'm getting two different log files and
that each of them is stored.  And since I have this on 130
machines, I'm getting 260 files every five minutes.  A week ago
this filled up my disk.  And this past week the system ran out of
inodes.  The entertainment never stops! :-)

I'm pretty sure that the green message is from my BB client.  (My
MSGS were all green before I put my addition in place.)  I don't
really know where the clear message is coming from.  I'm guessing
that it's coming from hobbit but I have no idea how I started
this "feature".

If it is coming from hobbit: How does it run?  Why does it run?
Should I be using this instead of the BB client?  Where do I go
to track down some of this stuff?

I'd appreciate any guidance both on my problem and any location
of where I could go to learn more about this.

Thanks!

-- 
- Bill
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
Bill Benedetto     <bbenedetto at goodyear.com>    The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

I don't speak for Goodyear and they don't speak for me.  We're both happy.