[hobbit] bbwin 0.10 available

[Henrik Stoerner]

I am very happy to hear this, and even more so that BBWin now supports
a centralized configuration.

Etienne writes:

> I have also some general questions about bbwin  :
> 
> Actually, svcs only works as a local agent because there is no option
> for it in hobbit-clients.cfg, it is very specific to Windows world.
> What do you prefer ?
> 
> -	we keep svcs agent with local configuration. BBWin can handle
> centralized mode with agents which will run with local configuration
> -	we create a new option for the hobbit-clients.cfg which will be only
> used for Windows client
> -	May be you have other good ideas about that problem. At this time,
> it is only about svcs agent but for advanced features in the future,
> we will have other choices to make.

My preferred solution would be to have it in the hobbit-clients.cfg
file, so there is a specific configuration statement for the Windows
services check. There are a lot of Windows boxes being monitored with
Hobbit, and I very much consider BBWin an essential companion to Hobbit.
So the configuration should be as Hobbit-like as possible, even if it
means implementing bits of code in Hobbit that are specific to BBWin.

> With the centralized mode, you will see that you get graphs for each
> of your networks connections. However, for Windows, the names are too
> long compared to the unix name (eth0, eri0..). So, at this time, I use
> the mac address of the network card for the graph name. Would you
> prefer to use the name by making a very short name ? the ip address ?
> or is the mac address fine ?

There's really two sides to this issue. One thing is to identify the
network interface from one poll to the next, so we put the right data
into the RRD files - for this we can use any identifier that is
guaranteed to be a)unique and b)permanent. Another thing is to present
the interface name in some sensible way on the graph.

I don't really like using the MAC address, because it is difficult to
relate to anything meaningful - I wouldn't know that my primary
interface is 00:0E:A6:CE:D6:85, but I do know it's called "eth0".
I've had the same problem for the SNMP data collection, so I have come
up with an "rrd.meta" file that can map the ID of the network interface
into a text that appears on the graph. The code isn't pretty, and it is 
static data that must be maintained by hand - if anyone has a better 
suggestion, please speak up.

> There is a new agent 'who' used to report current connected users on
> the windows servers. There is no alert for it at this time. Which
> relevant type of alerts could be useful ? there is no alert options on
> Unix side. I was thinking of a rule like PROC but called USER with a
> minimum logged number and a maximum logged number for a username.

Would make sense, also as a check on the unix systems.

> For 2008, I will do my best to create more releases. 

Me too :-)


Regards,
Henrik