Ball Dawg!

I recently ran into an issue where my I had Xymon clients on a network which was unpingable from the Xymon server.  The clients could could send data to the server, but they were hidden behind network address translation and only on a local network.  I had one box (the gateway for the unreachable clients), that saw both networks.  I played with the idea of running bbproxy on it, but didn’t really want an entire Xymon server and it really was not necessary since the other clients could get their data out.  Looking at hobbitlaunch.cfg I noticed it was really just a larger clientlaunch.cfg, which gave me the idea of just copying over bbnet and using on a client install – which worked perfectly.

To do this you’ll need to copy over the following binarys from the server installation into your client’s bin directory:

• bbtest-net
• hobbitping

You’ll also need a copy of your bb-hosts and bb-services file, you’ll need to place these in your client’s etc folder. In your bb-hosts file you’ll only need the hosts that are within the private network you intend to ping, you really don’t need any grouping information within it either since when the data is sent in to your xymon server it will be assigned to the correct hosts there.

At this point you need to add a section for bbnet within your clientlaunch.cfg, yours may be different since your file locations my vary, so edit to fit your situation:

[bbnet]
ENVFILE /usr/lib/hobbit/client/etc/clientlaunch.cfg
CMD /usr/lib/hobbit/client/bin/bbtest-net --report --ping --checkresponse
LOGFILE $BBSERVERLOGS/bb-network.log
INTERVAL 5m

Since bbtest-net needs to know what to do you’ll need to copy its configuration section from hobbitserver.cfg to hobbitclient.cfg:

# For bbtest-net
CONNTEST="TRUE"
IPTEST_2_CLEAR_ON_FAILED_CONN="TRUE"
NONETPAGE=""
FPING="/usr/sbin/fping"
NTPDATE="ntpdate"
TRACEROUTE="traceroute"
BBROUTERTEXT="router"
NETFAILTEXT="not OK"

And there you have it – restart your client and it should be able to ping the clients within the private network and send to your Xymon server.  You’ll notice a column for bbtest show up for the client you setup to ping as well.   This should work for all network tests, however I’ve just tested ping.