Keywords: Big Sister, Bigsister, Network Monitor, Network Monitoring, Perl, GPL, Big Brother, manual, SNMP

Using the bsadmin tool
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### Using the bsadmin tool

`bsadmin` is commandline based tool wich comes with Big Sister and offers a more comfortable way of sending server commands than the telnet client. It basically takes the same commands and arguments than the telnet client.

Example 3.3. Getting rid of unwanted status lights ("purples")

Whenever an agent stops reporting status messages for a certain host/check the Big Sister display server will still remember this host/check and display a purple ("no report") status light. This is the indended behaviour since by this means you notice which checks are currently not working (e.g. due to a connection loss with the respective agent).

However sometimes you will remove or rename a host/check and want those purples to just disappear. Big Sister 0.96 introduces a "remove" command for exactly this purpose. Agents now can send a "remove host.check" to the display server and the respective status light will disappear. The required procedure is actually a good example on how to send server commands using the telnet client or bsadmin.

Table 3.4. Accepted keywords and function

Function | Using bsadmin | Using the telnet client
--- | --- | ---
remove a single check | bsadmin -d`servername` remove`hostname.checkname` | telnet`servername` `port` remove`hostname.checkname`
remove all checks of a host | bsadmin -d`servername` remove`hostname.*` | telnet`servername` `port` remove`hostname.*`
remove a host completely | bsadmin -d`servername` leave`hostname *` | telnet`servername` `port` leave`hostname *`

In Big Sister versions prior to rev. 0.96, the remove command has not been implemented in the server protocol. Big Sister Version 0.96 to 0.98 need an additional `remove hostname.*` command for removing a host completely.

Never forget to limit access to this removal command (see Server access: /etc/bigsister/permissions)

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