Re: {bb} No yellow notificatoins since 10/29?

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

On Wed, 2006-11-08 at 00:07, Mike Blake wrote:
> 
> We have a Solaris 8 system that is fairly well patched running Big
> Brother 1.9i.  It has been running just fine for years.  For some reason
> we have not received a single yellow notification since October 29th,
> around 8pm.
> 
> Since then we have had many services/tests go into and out of a yellow
> condition, but no alerts are generated.  I mean, Big Brother doesn't
> even try.  No errors or logged, but nothing shows up in the
> notifications log and no messages are received.
> 
> The yellow states show up properly on the web display.  They are noticed
> and processed by Big Brother.  It simply doesn't seem to be deciding to
> send messages like it used to.
> 
> Red and purple states are still processes exactly as they were before,
> so there's no problem there.  I pulled the entire tree off tape from the
> day before and two weeks before messages stoped coming through.  There
> have been no configuration changes in that time.  I don't mean no
> relevant changes, I mean no changes.  All files identical.
> 
> I have even tried shuting down the server, wiping out bbvar and starting
> over from scratch, wiping out everything in the server's tmp directory,
> and restarting.  Still nothing.
> 
> Is anybody else having this problem or is it only me?

No, it's just you :)

As you concluded, the fact that "yellow" alerts are not appearing in
notifications.log usually indicates that BB is either discarding or
failing to generate those alerts. The most common cause is a change
(intentional or otherwise) to the pagelevels token in bbwarnsetup.cfg.

It is sometimes overlooked that, to avoid problems like this, the
value needs to be consistent across all machines. For example, if
"yellow" was missing from pagelevels on a client, then that client
would not generate yellow alerts for those tests. Similarly, if
you have a separate BBNET and BBPAGER and "yellow" was missing on
the BBNET, those network tests would not create yellow alerts.

So, unless you have a combined BB server (with BBDISPLAY, BBNET and
BBPAGER on one machine) and have seen this problem with both network
and client-side tests, it would be useful to check the configuration
on each machine (or at least those clients which have exhibited the
problem).

After that, it would probably be best to enable debugging in bbpage.c
on the BBPAGER and re-compile. It's best to then run the resulting
daemon only for the time it takes to generate a test yellow condition
(by adjusting disk limits etc.), because the output it generates is
very verbose. That should confirm whether the alert is being received
or not and indicate why it might be being ignored.

Cheers, Phil.



-- 
Heisenberg may have slept here.

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