BBWARN: A Notification Extension for Big Brother

Robert-Andre Croteau

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Like any UNIX system administrator, I would rather work in a proactive mode than a reactive one. One tool that has enabled me to achieve this goal is BB, the "Big Brother Systems and Network Monitor" written by Sean MacGuire. BB is available at http://www.maclawran.ca/. This Web-based UNIX system and network monitor runs on most UNIX platforms and has an NT client (see sidebar). An article describing BB appeared in the March 1997 issue of Sys Admin.

Although BB's built-in notification capabilities include email, numeric pager and SMS, I found the methods available too narrow and restrictive for my purposes. All alerts are sent to the same admin(s) on a 24x7 basis. Problems with a particular service can't be sent to one particular admin; any alert will be sent to all admins defined in the configuration file. I viewed this as a major drawback and decided to modify BB to make it more flexible. Fortunately, BB is uniquely designed to accommodate various alterations and adaptations, so I set to work. When properly modified, specific alerts can be sent out to admins according to various criteria defined in a configuration file. These will allow for notifications to be sent based on combinations of hosts, services, dates, and times of day.

Installing BBWARN

Although the BBWARN extension is based on version 1.06a of BB, the following modifications should work with most previous versions. I recommend that you first install BB and configure the basic notification feature properly.

First, make a backup of your current installation of BB on the host defined by the BBPAGER keyword in the bb-hosts file.