Customizing the Big Brother Display

If you want, you can have a little more control over the general appearance of the Big Brother status pages. This topic is a quick reference as to what you can change and how.

Note. In addition to the changes described here, you can split the Big Brother display into separate tables and/or separate HTML pages by using directives in the etc/bb-hosts file. See Defining Big Brother Servers for directions. You can also add content to either the main or condensed display.

Where Do Big Brother Pages Come From?

By default, the summary pages--bb.html and bb2.html--are created by mkbb and mkbb2 every five minutes; you can change this interval by changing the BBSLEEP value in runbb.sh. The appearance of the pages is controlled by the etc/bbinc.sh file and  files in the $BBHOME/www directory. Individual system reports are also generated by the bbd process and placed in the $BBHOME/www/html directory. The main and summary screens are saved in the $BBHOME/www directory. Do not edit any of the generated HTML files, as your changes will be removed the next time the files are generated.

To change the look, we recommend you create a new "skin" for Big Brother and tell Big Brother to use it., though you can also modify the default skin. To create and use a new skin:

1.

Decide on a name for the new skin. This determines the name of the subdirectory you will create in the $BBHOME/www directory.

2.

Create the $BBHOME/www/<skin> directory. Copy all of the subfolders and files from an existing skin directory (for example, gifs or psy) to it.

3.

Modify the settings in etc/bbinc.sh as desired. See below for details.

4.

Modify the files in $BBHOME/www/<skin> as desired. See below for details.

5.

Set  the BBSKIN variable in bbinc-server.sh to the name of the new skin.

 

Controlling Fonts

You can change the font of the BB display pages by modifying the CSS files located in www\<skin>.  The bb-global.css file contains most settings for the display of the BB pages.  The bb-<color>.css files contains settings that a particular to a background color scheme.  The entries in the CSS files can be found in the source of the HTML pages by looking for the "class=" identifier.

 

Controlling Titles

Variables in the etc/bbinc-server.sh file are simply tags to the titles in  parts of  the bb.html (main display), bb2.html (condensed display), and HTML versions of the status logs. This is a partial list of the variables you can set::

Refer to the etc\bbinc-server file for all configurable options.

Note. You will need to stop and restart Big Brother for these changes to take effect.

Using New Images

There are non-blinking versions of the default .gif files in www/gifs; their names start with nb-. To use them, simply copy them over the blinking gif images. You can also use your own images by replacing the .gif files in that folder. In either case, we strongly recommend you keep a copy of the original .gif files.

 

Changing Headers and Footers

The header and footer files used for page generation are located in the $BBHOME/web directory. These files are named according to the files they control:

File Names

Page

bb_header
bb_footer

Big Brother main display page (bb.html)

bb2_header
bb2_footer

Big Brother condensed view (bb2.html)

hostsvc_header
hostsvc_footer

Individual status pages

hist_header
hist_footer

History pages

histlog_header
histlog_footer

Historical status info

ack_header
ack_footer

Acknowledgement result

rep_header
rep_footer

Overall uptime reports

replog_header
replog_footer

Single event uptime reports

enadis_header
enaids_footer

Enable/Disable management page

doenadis_header
doenaids_footer

Enable/Disable processing page

 

If you use the page or subpage directives in bb-hosts to create additional display pages, you can modify the headers or footers for the new pages by creating <page>_header and <page>_footer files in $BBHOME/web, where <page> is the name of the page. For subpages, the filenames must be <page>_<subpage>_header and <page>_<subpage>_footer. You can also create headers and footers for report pages and subpages: the filenames to use are <page>rep_header, <page>rep_footer, <page>_<subpage>rep_header, and <page>_<subpage>rep_footer.

Within these files, you may want to define your own stylesheets, insert images, move images around, or modify text. You can use these special tags in the files:

External Tests

If you create your own tests for Big Brother, every time a status log is received, an HTML version of the status log is created (either statically in www/html or dynamically using the hostsvc.exe CGI) by prefixing the status with the header file and suffixing with the footer file. You can include the following tags in your status report to display the colored dots in your status log:

&red
&green
&yellow
&clear
&purple
&blue

These tags are replaced with a corresponding image source tag for the HTML version.

 

Background images

You can change the background images by replacing the bkg-<color>.jpg files that are located in the www/<skin>  directory.  You can create new background images or use images from four sets of images that are shipped with the product.  

 

Hiding entries in the generated HTML pages

You can hide complete entries defined in etc/bb-hosts.cfg from the display or you can just hide certain columns for an entry.  This is achieved by specifying the nodisp token in the line entry.  If you specify nodisp, the complete entry will be removed from the generated page while if you use the same token with column specifiers, the given columns current status will not be displayed.  For example,:

 

1.2.3.4  some.host # ftp smtp nodisp

 

the some.host will not be displayed in the BB generated pages.

 

for hiding column values for an entry, try:

 

1.2.3.4 some.host # ftp smtp nodisp:ftp:smtp

 

This line  will be displayed but the ftp and smtp test results will not show up for this line entry.