The Big Brother Systems and Network Monitor

| help

## Understanding the Notification feature (BBWARN)

BB comes preconfigured to notify to root@localhost if there's a problem. For most admins, this setup is not enough. As you start modifying bbwarnrules.cfg & bbwarnsetup.cfg, and somethimes BBWARN breaks. This document explains how are notifications handled by BB. ### Everything starts on the client On each client, there's a set of scripts that are executed and send their status using the 'bb' program. The primary task of the 'bb' program is to send a status to the BBDISPLAY host(s). But if the color level of the status is defined by the environment variable PAGELEVELS then a "page" message is sent to the BBPAGER host(s) defined in the etc/bb-hosts file. Note that you can define multple BBPAGER hosts in the bb-hosts file (new from version 1.3). The PAGELEVELS variable is derived from two locations. The default is defined in the etc/bbdef.sh script: the default is "red purple". Those values are overridden by the values defined in the etc/bbwarnsetup.cfg file with the "pagelevels" token. ### ... and make their way to the BBDPAGER host(s) On each BBPAGER host, a "bbd" process listens for messages and if a "page" message is received then it takes the message data associated with the "page" message and fork/exec itself to handle the notification.

###### © Copyright Quest Software, Inc. 1997-2002 All rights reserved.