Big Brother - Adding devices to the bb-hosts file.

To monitor network servers, workstations, routers, switches, printers, RAID, and more with Big Brother you must add those devices to the $BBHOME/etc/bb-hosts (UNIX/Linux), or, %BBHOME%\etc\bb-hosts.cfg (Windows) file on the management server.
Along with adding the device device to the bb-hosts file, you must also configure the network tests you want to perform on each computer/device. And, you must also define which computers will be performing the various tasks of the Big Brother server (BBDISPLAY, BBNET and BBPEGER):

BBSERVER TASKS:

  • BBDISPLAY - Creates the Web pages for display.
  • BBNET - Performs the network tests (conn, http, ftp, telnet, ssh, etc...).
  • BBPAGER - Sends notification messages.

    On the Big Brother server, the etc/bb-hosts (UNIX/Linux), or, etc\bb-hosts.cfg (Windows) file contains information on all Big Brother servers and all hosts you want to monitor. The bb-hosts file can also contain directives controlling how the status display Web pages are built.

    An example bb-hosts file is below:
    group-compress <H3>Big Brother PE Server</H3>
    10.1.1.1 bbserver.domain.com # testip BBDISPLAY BBNET BBPAGER http://bbserver/bb

    group-compress <H3>Big Brother PE Windows Clients</H3>
    10.1.1.2 win2.domain.com # !telnet !ftp !ssh
    10.1.2.3 win3.domain.com # !telnet !ftp !ssh

    group-compress <H3>Big Brother PE NIX Clients</H3>
    10.1.10.1 nix1.domain.com # testip telnet ftp ssh
    10.1.10.2 nix2.domain.com # testip telnet ftp ssh
    Okay, let's break that down a little bit:

  • group-compress - This directive defines a group of devices that will exist in the same table on the BBDISPLAY.

  • <H3>ANY TEXT</H3> - Any text after the group-compress directive will be displayed above the list of devices on the BBDISPLAY main page. HTML can be used on this line to make the main display easier to read.

  • # - The pound sign (#) after the device IP address and name is not a comment! It is a delimiter between a device definition and Big Brother directives and network tests. For example the word "testip" is a BB directive, testip tells the BBNET server to use the IP address of the device to perform all network tests.

  • telnet ftp ssh - These are network service tests. The BBNET server will test these services for availability. If these services are prefixed with a !, BBNET will test that the service is not available.

    NOTE: Changes made to the bb-hosts file on a UNIX/Linux management server will take effect after the bb-hosts file is saved. Changes made to the bb-hosts.cfg file will not take effect until the BBServer Windows Service is restarted.

    The image below is a graphical representation of the contents of the bb-hosts file above.


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