Big Brother servers must be defined as hosts in the etc/bb-hosts file. When the Big Brother server starts up, the first thing it does is look for its own definition in this file. It determines from its entry line which role(s) it should enable. The roles are:
|
Role |
Description |
|
BBDISPLAY |
Receives incoming status logs from Big Brother clients and generates the bb.html (main page) and bb2.html (condensed view) Web pages using those status logs. You can define more than one BBDISPLAY server if you want to run parallel instances. To use multiple BBDISPLAY servers, each Big Brother client's configuration must be defined with all required BBDISPLAY servers. See below for more information on configuring a BBDISPLAY server. |
|
BBPAGER |
Receives requests to notify administrators and processes those notification requests. There can be more than one BBPAGER, but if there are, you'll be notified once from each BBPAGER server for the same event as there is no synchronization between BBPAGER servers |
|
BBNET[:tag] |
Performs all network tests on each host protocol listed in the bb-hosts file. If a host is tested by multiple BBNETs then each BBNETs should be given a location tag to differentiate each test provenance. Otherwise the current status display for the services on that host will only show the last test status received from all BBNETs. The host may show as green even though you have received errors for that host; it's just that another BBNET sent a status message afterwards and that message returned OK. We recommend you use multiple BBNET servers only after you are very comfortable with Big Brother. To specify a location tag for a BBNET, append the name of the location to the BBNET directive, i.e. BBNET:LAX. In this example, all tests from this BBNET host will be tagged with LAX to differentiate them from other locations. |
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The host defined in the BBRELAY directive will be relayed all messages received by the host defined in the current entry. For example: 1.2.3.4 bbhost # BBDISPLAY BBRELAY:2.3.4.5 The BBDISPLAY host (1.2.3.4) will relay all of its incoming messages to the 2.3.4.5 host. The current host does not have to be a BBDISPLAY. It can just be BBRELAY: 1.2.3.4 bbhost # BBRELAY:2.3.4.5 For this setup, all Big Brother clients must be defined with 1.2.3.4 as a BBDISPLAY, but the bb.html and bb2.html pages will be created on and accessed through host 2.3.4.5. If the BBRELAY host does not use port 1984 for Big Brother, include the port number after the IP address. For example: 1.2.3.4 bbhost # BBRELAY:2.3.4.5:1111 BBRELAY is useful to redirect status messages to a central location as well as keeping a local copy. It is also helpful if you need to move the BBDISPLAY but do not want to modify all clients with the new BBDISPLAY address. You can specify multiple BBRELAYs. |
The bb-hosts file on a BBDISPLAY server contains the directives that control the display format of the generated web pages. The directives which do this are page, subpage, group, group-compress and group-only. A BBDISPLAY server creates at least 2 status HTML pages: bb.html and bb2.html. The display directives apply only to bb.html. bb2.html contains only host entries that have ongoing events (red, yellow, or purple status)
The page directive tells Big Brother to start a new display page. The hosts and display directives following it in bb-hosts will be displayed on a new status HTML page. Each generated page can be accessed by a link on bb.html. Always insert your page directives after all host entries that you want to appear on the bb.html page because when you use a page directive all subsequent output will be to that page.
The format of the page directive is:
page page-name <H3>Whatever you'd like the page title to be</H3>
The first argument is the page directive, the second one is the name to give the page (for example, nyrouters), and the rest of the line is the description that will appear in bb.html for the link to that page. You can put HTML tags in the page description.
Note. Summaries and dialup directives will always appear on bb.html or bb2.html and not in any HTML pages/subpages created using the page or subpage directive.
The subpage directive behaves just like the page directive except that the new HTML page is linked to from the current page and not from bb.html. Think of it as a page inside a page. The format of the directive is:
subpage subpage-name <H3>Whatever you'd like the subpage title to be</H3>
You can break the various generated HTML pages (bb.html, and so on) into tables to create a more aesthetic and sensible display. It's also much faster to load multiple small tables instead of one giant table. So consider grouping your bb-hosts entries logically and separating them using the group, group-compress or group-only directives. The format of the group directive is:
group <H3>Whatever you'd like the group title to be</H3>
All host lines following the group directive, until the next group, group-compress, or group-only directive, belong to this group and display as an HTML table. The text that follows the directive is the title given to the HTML table. You can embed HTML code in the title.
The format for group-compress is the same as for group, except for the directive name:
group-compress <H3>Whatever you'd like the group-compress title to be</H3>
The table defined by group-compress displays only the columns that have data.
Finally, group-only lets you define specific columns to appear in the table:
group-only column1|column2|column3|... <H3>Whatever you'd like the group-only title to be</H3>
Only the columns listed in the directive will be displayed in the table. There's a special case for group-only where you want to display all columns within a group except a set of columns. To achieve this, define the entry as:
group-only *!column1!column2!column3!... <H3>Whatever you'd like the group-only title to be</H3>
Notice that the seperator is a ! and not the | character.
Note. If pagetype in etc/bbwarnsetup.cfg is set to GROUP, the group directives also determine which hosts are effected by the page delay after a notification is acknowledged.
The summary directive allows you to send a link to any of the current display's generated HTML pages to a remote instance of Big Brother. The current status of the HTML page will appear as a colored dot representing the status of the given URL. The user of the remote BBDISPLAY server will be able to click that colored dot to display the page associated with the URL.
You can create hierarchical summaries using this directive. The format of the summary directive is:
summary fim.dev1 bbserver.quest.com http://bbserver.quest.com/bb/bb.html
| | | | + URL of the HTML page
| | | + machine or IP address to send summary info to
| | + column name
| + row name
+ directive
The line created by a summary directive always appears at the bottom of the bb.html and bb2.html pages, not on any other pages or subpages you may have defined.
Note. You can change the appearance of your Big Brother display pages or add content to them.
The display directive
This directive creates a segregated BB display structure. This is especially helpful for installations where you need to allow viewing to specific portions of the BB display. You can consider it a BB display within another BB display. You can define multiple display zone by using multiple display directives. For more information, consult the "Creating display zones" topic.