Re: {bb} Hobbit questions

[Henrik Storner <henrik-bb@hswn.dk>]

In <3DD6D733ACDA8345BF4D443FECEC13B00522A977@cnfqe130.cnf.prod.cnf.com> "Hale, Barbara S - CNF" <hale.barbara@cnf.com> writes:

>I took a look at the Hobbit web pages (http://www.hswn.dk/hobbit/) and
>it looks very exciting.  I'm sure I'm not the only who has questions and
>wishlists about Hobbit that I couldn't find in the documentation (though
>it may be there).  How would you like for us to ask questions:  Direct
>email to you?  Via this BB mailing list?  Wait for a while until Hobbit
>is closer to release to the world?

Well, it obviously sounds like I need to publish a feature-list for
Hobbit real soon. That will make it clear what's already in Hobbit,
which seems like a good starting point. Will do so as soon as I get
the beta-version done and delivered.

Questions and feature requests - it's fine with me to discuss them
here on the list.  My only concern is if the BB people (Sean, Robert,
Quest) feel that I'm kind of abusing their hospitality by discussing
something that will (in one way or another) be a competitor, on their
mailinglist. If they feel bad about it, no problem - I will setup a
list dedicated to Hobbit outside of the bb4.com mailinglists, but they
haven't raised this issue with me (at least not yet).

And if you have something that you'd rather discuss privately or you
feel it is not of interest to the entire list, mail me directly and
we'll take it from there. E.g. Hobbit is quite modular so you may be
interested in adding your own module to the Hobbit server, to handle
specific needs you have - custom graphs, storing all logs in a
database, interfacing to other systems and so on.

>For example, will Hobbit support a failover server like Big Brother?

Not in the first release, but I know how to implement it. The idea is
to have the failover server running in a "standby" mode, where it
periodically checks the master server, and mirrors the status from the
master. If the master fails, the failover system fires up the full set
of server programs, loads the Hobbit state from the last mirror it
received, and voila - failover complete. The interesting part of it is
to combine this with some clustering software, so the failover becomes
transparent to both the BB clients and the people viewing the BB
webpages - this should be possible, I think, for a real failover
solution. And it can be done with Hobbit.

>Will it support Windows BB clients? On the wish list side, will we be
>able to split disk usage alerts so different file systems can alert
>different groups (ex. DBAs for database file systems).

Hobbit uses the same mechanism for receiving status messages as BB, so
any BB client will continue to work. Since Hobbit is currently ONLY
for the BB server, fancy monitoring of disk usage and other
client-side issues are out of scope. I'm not saying it isn't relevant
or important, but I simply haven't touched on the client-side of BB
yet.

>Thanks for all your hard work,
>Barbara

Knowing that what I do is useful is a great motivator.


Regards,
Henrik
-- 
Henrik Storner
--
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