[hobbit] Questions about migrating from BB

Fri Sep 18 17:46:44 CEST 2009

Pretty sure FQDN or not is asked when you compile the server.

Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373

"When you have eliminated the impossible, that which remains, however
improbable, must be the truth."
--- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 11:42 AM, Ryan Novosielski <novosirj at umdnj.edu>wrote:

> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Buchan Milne wrote:
> > ----- "Ryan Novosielski" <novosirj at umdnj.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
> >>
> >> Greg Hubbard wrote:
> >>> The CLIENT tag is used to tell the Xymon server how the incoming
> >> client
> >>> data will be tagged.  You use this when your Xymon agent and the
> >> Xymon
> >>> server do not agree on which name to use -- usually because one
> >>> of
> >> the
> >>> entries has FQDN and the other does not.  This is the "cheap fix"
> >>>
> >> for
> >>> "ghost" clients -- see the ghost report.
> >> That's what I figured. On Solaris, it seems I run into this on all
> >> of the hosts. uname -n always seems to return a short name. In
> >> fact, it does not appear as if Solaris has much of a concept of a
> >> domain name,
> >
> > bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com
> > uname -n merga.ourdomain.com
> > bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com
> > hostname merga.telkomsa.net
> > bgmilne at merga.ourdomain.com
> > uname -a SunOS merga.ourdomain.com 5.9
> > Generic_117171-07 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V210
> >
> > (Of course, don't try 'hostname -d').
>
> Have you been able to find in writing anyplace that the hostname is
> supposed to be the FQDN? I haven't been able to, and I've seen a lot of
> references to the short name belonging in /etc/hostname.<if> and
> /etc/nodename. Most OS' separate hostname and domain name out, but it
> would seem that using the FQDN would at least fix the problems that
> require me to use CLIENT: on Solaris machines in my setup.
>
> >> Apparently not, and in my opinion, this is somewhat broken, unless
> >> I'm misconfiguring something. Xymon appears to only have one notion
> >> of a "server." If you're running a network test machine, it asks
> >> you for your server name (example pasted):
> >>
> >> BBSERVERHOSTNAME="xymon.umdnj.edu"              # The hostname of
> >> your server BBSERVERIP="130.219.34.102"                     # The
> >> IP-address of your server. Use the real one, not 127.0.0.1 .
> >> BBSERVEROS="sunos"                      # The operating system of
> >> your server. linux,freebsd,solaris,hpux,aix,osf
> >>
> >> The "bbtest" test, with a solely "BBNET" machine configured this
> >> way, appears as if it comes from the "BBNET" machine (status
> >> message received from IP is the "BBNET" machine), but the test
> >> shows up under whatever server name is defined in those above
> >> variables in hobbitserver.cfg.
> >
> > You only set *one* of those, BBSERVERHOSTNAME, which it uses in the
> > status message, which it sends to BBSERVERIP.
> >
> > See e.g. line 2321 of bbnet/bbtest-net.c sprintf(msgline, "status
> > %s.%s %s %s\n\n", xgetenv("MACHINE"), egocolumn, colorname(color),
> > timestamp);
> >
> > (In lib/environ.c, MACHINE is created from MACHINEDOTS if MACHINE
> > does not exist, and by default MACHINEDOTS=$BBSERVERHOSTNAME in
> > hobbitserver.cfg).
> >
> > I guess the descriptions of BBSERVERHOSTNAME and BBSERVERIP could be
> > improved in hobbitserver.cfg and hobbitserver.cfg(5), and
> > BBSERVERHOSTNAME could possibly default to the machine's hostname
> > instead ...
> >
> > BBSERVERHOSTNAME is the name of the host running that instance of
> > xymon as you would like it to be displayed in any messages about the
> > xymon processes, and BBSEVERIP is the IP of the Xymon server (hobbitd
> > or bbproxy) to which all status messages should be sent.
>
> OK, this makes a huge difference. Note that even the description is
> written to re-inforce that these both should be the same value:
>
> # The hostname of your server
> # The IP-address of your server. Use the real one, not 127.0.0.1 .
>
> ...assuming that "your server"="your server", as well as the fact that
> both say BBSERVER*=BBSERVER*. That is one thing that I'd alluded to
> earlier: the terminology that BB uses to call the BBDISPLAY machine and
> the BBNET machine make it clear what to put in the various config
> options. If they both reside on the same machine, it's obvious what to
> do, as opposed to the reverse (if they both say one machine and you've
> got two).
>
> > I might be able to fix some of these issues in future.
>
> Should be fairly simple documentation patches. I'm no programmer, but if
> that's necessary, I should be able to handle some of it.
>
> >> If you set that server name to the name of the BBNET machine, as I
> >> expected I was supposed to do initially, you get "connection
> >> refused" errors, as it tries to connect to itself and cannot as
> >> it's not running the server component that listens on the port.
> >>
> >> I'm starting to believe that while you CAN separate the BBNET and
> >> BBDISPLAY nodes with Xymon, no one is really doing it and it
> >> doesn't work that cleanly.
> >
> > I've been doing it since hobbit-4.1.0, and I have had no problems
> > (with more complex setups including bbproxy to have a staged
> > migration from bb).
>
> Thrilled to stand corrected. The changes I've made so far have made a
> difference. I guess we'll see going forward if I run into anything else.
> I'm running 4.2.3 incidentally, so I suppose it's possible that the
> latest changes are not in my version if any have been made.
>
> - --
>  ---- _  _ _  _ ___  _  _  _
>  |Y#| |  | |\/| |  \ |\ |  | |Ryan Novosielski - Systems Programmer II
>  |$&| |__| |  | |__/ | \| _| |novosirj at umdnj.edu - 973/972.0922 (2-0922)
>  \__/ Univ. of Med. and Dent.|IST/CST - NJMS Medical Science Bldg - C630
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
> Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
> Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
>
> iEYEARECAAYFAkqzqmYACgkQmb+gadEcsb4WMwCfWFWRhqIy+PKO/H9KYS/p0LJ/
> DuMAoLRhbY33h0/ElWTOi2nbmzrEB9PA
> =9tju
> -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
>
>
> To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
> hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/attachments/20090918/29a5cd52/attachment.html>