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

Adding new hosts and services
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## Adding new hosts and services

### The uxmon-net file

The agent (uxmon) will read its configuration from the file `/etc/bigsister/uxmon-net`

A good and well structured uxmon-net file consists of:

- Golbal DEFAULT values (for certain arguments)

- DESCR iptions of the monitored systems, so the the subsequent healthchecks know what environment they can expect and which features are available on the tested plattform

- The healthchecks together with the required parameters

Example 2.1. A simple uxmon-net configuration file

    # Set the default SNMP community to "public", the
    # default frequency is 1/5min anyway
    DEFAULT         community=public frequency=5 perf=5 ALL

    # Set the default version and protocol for rpc checks to "1" and "udp"
    DEFAULT         version=1 proto=udp rpc
    DEFAULT         proto=icmp ping

    DESCR           features=unix,linux,redhat,redhat71 localhost
    DESCR           features=unix,linux,suse,suse70 susix
    DESCR           features=unix,linux,redhat,redhat71 rejectix
    DESCR           features=unix,linux,redhat,redhat72 publizistix-ext

    localhost       perf=30 disk                    memory
    localhost       cpuload                         syslog
    localhost       fs=.0(20-60) dumpdates          dns
    localhost       proc=sendmail min=1 max=30 procs

    susix           ping                            perf=5 service=smtp tcp
    susix           dns                             ntp

    rejectix        ping                            dns

    publizistix-ext(publizistix)    ping                            dns
    publizistix-ext(publizistix)    perf=5 service=smtp tcp
    publizistix-ext(publizistix)    perf=5 service=ssh tcp

#### Multiple uxmon-net configuration files

Under Unix multiple uxmon-net files may exist - their name must start with uxmon-net followed by an arbitrary suffix (note that e.g. uxmon-net.bak is a valid agent configuration file!). bb_start will in this case start up an instance of uxmon for each of these configuration files.

#### The uxmon-asroot configuration file

Under Unix, the access to some (socket) commands might be prohibited for ordinary users and thereby for the bigsister account. I.e. on some systems only the root user can access icmp socket commands to send icmp pings. For such cases, Big Sister offers the option to create a special configuration file named uxmon-asroot. For the healthchecks configured in the uxmon-asroot file, bb_start will start an uxmon instance running with root privileges.

| Tip
In most cases, udp pings can also be used to see wether a system is alive or not. Setting the default-protocol used for the all subsequent ping healthchecks to udp might be a good idea.

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