Re: {bbd} Alternative Data Transport In Big Brother?

Hi Chris:

Take a look at bb-central-1.5.tar.gz on ftp.deadcat.net. This Big 
Brother plug-in uses SSH (scp) to connect to a client host, gather the 
data, and processes the data on the central Big Brother host, i.e. will 
send e-mail, update the displays, etc.  Some of the report modules 
support only Tru64 UNIX, but can easily be modified to support other 
UNIX variants via 'If" statements. bb-central is written in perl to 
performing reporting generation and shell script generation to gather 
the data. Please see the README file in the kit. By the way, SSH is set 
up in trusted mode between the central server and all the clients. You 
must log in, via SSH, between the central server and each client once, 
so SSH sets up the key exchange between hosts. If you use fully 
qualified domain names, make sure you supply the full domain name when 
connecting, as SSH treats fully qualified domain names different from 
non-fully qualified domain names. Finally, Big Brother is case sensitive 
on both types of host names.

In addition to perl, you might want to add MRTG and RRDtool for graph 
generation to your chosen host. I set up a standalone UNIX host, with 
all network services disabled, except for SSH. I installed Apache on the 
main host. Generally, the bb-central, with all the graph generations, 
should be set up to run four times per hour. Monitoring up to 50 hosts 
should be reasonable for this configuration.

I hope you find this information useful.

Nick


Christopher Koelbl wrote:
> I'm a sysadmin who has to administer servers that are only accessible 
> via crappy VPN clients.  As such, a monitoring program like Big Brother 
> is extremely useful to me by helping me keep an eye on things.  One 
> problem, however, is transferring the data from a remote location back 
> to my local BBDISPLAY.  Why would I want to do that?  Because at these 
> locations, we are not always allowed to have access to a mail server to 
> send notifications (Hospital security policies).  So here is my question:
>  
> Has anyone modified big brother to use an alternative communications 
> method between servers such as ftp or scp?  If so, does this transfer of 
> data come before or after email notifications of failures occur?
>  
> I am not yet a big brother developer, but the need for remote monitoring 
> is become increasingly important.  Manually checking servers at each 
> location becomes more and more unfeasible with every additional client. 
>  
> Many thanks for any info.  In the meantime, I'll be digging through the 
> various code and scripts to see how this modifcation might occur.
>  
> --Chris
>  
> Christopher Koelbl
> Systems Administrator
> eko systems inc.
> (703) 849-1477 x50
> [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>  


-- 
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Nick Metrowsky                   | http://users.americanisp.net/~nmetro/
3624 Oakwood Drive               | E-Mail: [email protected]
Longmont, CO 80503-7560          | Phone: (303)485-5696
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