If you are a user of Big Brother, you may know that by default, your reporting dates cut off on the year 2010. To extend this capability to the current year, you just need to edit bb-rep.html, found at /usr/local/bb/www/help/bb-rep.html. Simply add the following options to your start-yr and end-yr:
So you have a planned outage, and you don’t want the damn thing setting off alarms while it’s down? Easy enough. If you prefer to hold on to the entry in your bb-hosts file for later testing then this is for you. Simply enable this feature by editing /usr/local/bb/etc/bbdef-server.sh. Search the file for RUNOPTS. Around this line you will see other options we can add to RUNOPTS for different features:
RUNOPTS=”DATAMSG EMBEDHTML ENABLE_DISABLE”
export RUNOPTS
You can see that I already have test disabling, enabled here, by including ENABLE_DISABLE to the RUNOPTS line. Save and close and restart BB. Now that it's done, perform the following to disable a single test:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10(your BB server IP) “disable server.mycompany.com.conn 2h”
This will disable the connection ping test for 2 hours. The following will disable all tests on the same server for 24 days:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “disable server.mycompany.com* 24d”
To re-enable the server after repairs or maintenance are done:
/usr/local/bb/bin/bb 192.168.0.10 “enable server.mycompany.com*”
I have always followed CookIT services guide on installing Big Brother as a guideline, and it has worked very well. It’s intended use is for Solaris, but it gives you what you need for a successful installation. Regarding the section to install RRDTool and LARRD, there are some differences and things to note.
Just had to do this again recently and was having issues. Here is the script you need to create.
Make the client automatically start on boot
If you wish to start BB automatically at startup, create a file called bbc and put it in your /etc/init.d dir:
# vi /etc/init.d/bbc
Copy the c:\bbnt\ folder, binary included, from another server, and then from a command prompt:
c:
cd \bbnt
bbnt -y -install 137.238.1.200 Y
The IP 137.238.1.200 should be the same as your BBDISPLAY server. Now, in Server 2008, make sure that you command prompt window was launched with administrative privileges.
So there are a few tweaks I need to jot down so they don’t get lost. When installing a Big Brother (BB) client on a Linux or Solaris platform, there are a couple of things you may run into:
To send an SMS message there are two options: 1.Through an email to pager gateway. This requires the user to define, in bbwarnrules.cfg, the recipient as ep-XXXXXXXXXX where “XXXXXXXXXX” is the email address by the provider. 2. Install a modem on the BBPAGER server and configure the recipient as sms-smsrecipient where smsrecipient is a name that is defined and configured in bbwarnsms.cfg For detail steps for setup instructions (for bbwarnsetup.cfg and bbwarnrules.cfg) please see solution (23566) at the following link https://support.quest.com/eSupport/solution.asp?WAid=268468886 (more…)
There are instances where you will want to hide a test on the Big Brother display. For instance, if you followed the article to configure memory testing and graphing, you would want to hide the “mem” column.
This post is about memory tests and memory graphing for Big Brother. Out of the box, BB 4.1 Professional tests memory fine on Windows boxes, but not Linux.
This external script will perform tests on memory for Linux, including physical memory, actual memory and swap memory. Download it here. Here are the instructions, pretty easy:
Your servers! In all the years of administration, I can’t believe I overlooked this great monitoring tool. It was originally developed on the Linux platform, but now has support for the Windows platform as well as a Big Brother server. Clients can be of any flavor platform, including SNMP devices. It’s time I worked up documentation as we are using it at our office, and plan on rolling it out to all of our data centers to monitor mission critical operations. (more…)