big brother ..

[someone_4]

Does anyone use big brother? How does it work for you? Any tips on setting it up and installing it on hpux 11.0.

Richard

[Craig Rants]

I used big brother for two years, it was great!
If you can script, you can do just about anything you want with it. You can monitor databases, applications, routers (with the MRTG plug-in)... We even were able to auto generate trouble tickets into our Remedy system. Our management thought it was the coolest thing since sliced bread and we always showed it off at our dog and pony shows...

As far as installation, you only have to compile it once per O/S, then you distribute a client tarball ... the documentation is quite good and their is a lot of support docs on their site...

Have fun with it!

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi Richard,
Here weve been using bb for 2 years also, though we do also have patrol (no comments...) my collegue and myself prefer bb because WE are administrator of the tool and its accessible from the web (intranet sites) where as patrol is only on NTconsoles that no one bothers to look at (since our hierarchy refused X systems...)...
We use it to check if some procs are running or not also...


All the best

Victor

[harry d brown jr]

I've used BB about 1.5 years ago, and I interfaced it with telamon for paging and emails. I tought it was a great way to get a quick jumpstart into monitoring. Now we use OpenView, but the administration is complex in our very large environment. We need a full time admin, but the SA dept has failed to realize it yet!

live free or die
harry

[Mike Hassell]

Richard,

If you are currently looking into using Big Brother, I would recommend that you also take a look at Big "Sister" as it is a direct clone of bb, but offers even more configuration options and is done primarily in perl.

http://bigsister.graeff.com/

Both of these utils are great, because they offer so many configuration options and you can tweak them to meet the needs of your specific environment. It's worth spending some time implementing either of these as they sure have paid off for us in the long run, good luck.

-Mike

[someone_4]

uggg ..
im to the make portion of the install .. and I am getting this ..


cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c bb.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c bbsend.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c utils.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -o bb bb.o bbsend.o utils.o
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: (Warning) At least one PA 2.0 object file (bb.o) was detected.
The linked output may not run on a PA 1.x system.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c dohostsvc.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c bbd.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c bbpage.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -o bbd bbd.o dohostsvc.o bbpage.o
bbsend.o utils.o
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: (Warning) At least one PA 2.0 object file (bbd.o) was detected.
The linked output may not run on a PA 1.x system.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c bbnet.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -o bbnet bbnet.o utils.o
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: (Warning) At least one PA 2.0 object file (bbnet.o) was detecte
d. The linked output may not run on a PA 1.x system.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c touchtime.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -o touchtime touchtime.o
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: (Warning) At least one PA 2.0 object file (touchtime.o) was det
ected. The linked output may not run on a PA 1.x system.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c dumphostsvc.c
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -o dumphostsvc dumphostsvc.o dohos
tsvc.o utils.o
(Bundled) cc: warning 480: The -O option is available only with the C/ANSI C pro
duct; ignored.
/usr/ccs/bin/ld: (Warning) At least one PA 2.0 object file (dumphostsvc.o) was d
etected. The linked output may not run on a PA 1.x system.
cc -O -DHPUX -DREGEXEC -DGETTIMEOFDAY -c getipaddr.c
(Bundled) cc: wa

[Santosh Nair_1]

Those errors are from the bundled compiler because it doesn't support all the features of the full ansi compliant compiler (which you'd have to pay for). The executables should be fine though.

Also, if you're using BB, consider adding LARRD to the mix (http://www.packetpushers.com/projects.htm). It stores historical data about various aspects of the system such as memory and cpu usage, etc. It even generates nice graphs for you.

Here is a sample page.

http://bb.packetpushers.com/cgi-bin/bb-hostsvc.sh?HOSTSVC=loco,packetpushers,com.larrd

-Santos

[Mike Hassell]

Richard,

Chances are this problem is caused by your C compiler. The default C compiler that ships with HP-UX is rather brain dead and is really only used for compiling the kernel itself. Download and install the GNU C compiler 'gcc' on your system and include it in your PATH. Be sure to also download binutils as some of these are needed as well for compiling most GNU software out there, you may also need 'gmake' or GNU make. Here are the links to the pre-packaged files:

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/gcc-3.0.1/

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/binutils-2.11.2/

http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Gnu/make-3.79.1/

Install these using the 'swinstall' command and then make reference to them in your PATH, for example:

export PATH=/opt/binutils/bin:$PATH:/opt/gcc/bin:/opt/make/bin

Then start again, by running the 'configure' script -> 'gmake' and sometimes 'gmake install'.

Hope that helps and don't forget to assign some points if any of this is helpful, Thanks.

-Mike

[MAD_2]

Santosh, where do I find the setup manual for "Packet Pusher"? I liked the graphs and already downloaded the tar, but I did not see a configuration manual.

Thanks!

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Richard,

I used it two years ago for SUN platforms. For me, it works simply and very efficiently. Many times, it paged me when a disk went bad or network was congested... I highly recommend it. Personally, I like it much better than expensive, BMC Patrol.

Hai

[Kevin Wright]

I have just recently set it up on a Linux NMS as a proof of concept..I was able to use perl modules called bigbrother with DBD to monitor a test Oracle DB. It seems like it could be a great monitoring product, easy to setup, but I haven't had much time to play with it other than the test DB.

[Geoff Wild]

I have used bb for over 2 years - and it works great - we now have OVO installed - but use bb as a backup for when we take OVO down for maintenance.

If you want to compile on HP-UX, then you need the full blown CC compiler from HP (extra cost) or just download gcc as others have said above.

Rgds...Geoff