Re: {bb} allevents log showing states as "-1"

[Philip Clark <bblist@cannae.uklinux.net>]

On Thu, 2006-07-06 at 20:00, Michael Short wrote:
> We've been running BB 1.8c on some Solaris 2.8 hosts for awhile
> successfully. Recently, we wanted to add some linux hosts to the mix,
> but the default scripts wouldn't run properly.  I did some patching,
> and things seem to run fine except I've somehow messed up our bb server.

The first thing to say is that 1.8c is now very old. Staying with that
can be defended on the principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Well, it is broken now and that might be the best excuse for getting
things up-to-date.

Secondly, I would not have expected that any significant tweaking would
be needed to get the software to install on a Linux machine. That is
perhaps an indication that something went wrong with the install.

> Every client info sent to the server now gets written into the allevents
> file with a missing "oldcolor" and a state of "-1".  E.g.  where we would
> before have allevents show
> 
>      host.name service 1060352745 1060352745 0 gr gr 0
> 
> we now get
> 
>      host.name service 1152211066 1152209866 1200 gr - -1
> 
> On the bb2.html page, a lot of incoming events are getting shown as "clear"
> -> "green".  Yellow and Red states work fine, sending out alarms and showing
> on the web pages.  And the Green conditions show fine.  It's just they seem
> to be referenced from a non-state of Clear.

That would not normally be worrying. The "-1" status and the missing
"oldcolor" value are the same thing. This would be expected on the first
report of any new client. But it sounds as if you are getting this
condition repeatedly, which isn't normal.

> An adding symptom is that, on the service level web page where it shows
> the bar strip for the states in the last 24 hours, the green areas have
> sporadic bars, where the clear events are coming in.  But these aren't
> evenly spaced.  They happen for all hosts, but the frequency can go from
> minutes to hours.

That also appears consistent with the entries in "allevents". I don't
expect that this is the cause, but it's as if some of the status logs
are being periodically deleted. Then, when a new report comes in, BB
has no record of the previous status.

> Our server seems fine, load avg always below 1.  And our network seems ok
> -- we can test copying files across it with a speed we've seen before.
> 
> Any ideas on what could be wrong?
> (I'm trying not to revert to an old backup, and redo my script changes.)

If you detail the changes that you made, that might be helpful.
You should also confirm that it is version 1.8c that you installed
on the new clients. Newer client versions may be incompatible with
older server installs.

Cheers, Phil.



-- 
I went into a general store, and they wouldn't sell me anything
specific. (Steven Wright)

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