Feb 182000
Big Brother is watching you (and your network)
As mentioned in the documentation, Big Brother is a a web-based systems and network monitoring and notification system. For more information, see http://MacLawran.ca/bb-dnld/features.html.Note: Big Brother requires a web server. So install it on a box which already has apache installed. See the Apache topics for more information.
Installing Big Brother
Remember, I have the entire ports tree installed. So it was easy. See also, Installing a port without installing the ports.cd /usr/ports/net/bb make install
The file to read is ./work/bb/README.INSTALL. In there, it suggests that you subscribe to the Big Brother mailing list. I did. So should you. To subscribe:
Send an e-mail to MajorDomo@taex001.tamu.edu In the body of the e-mail message (not the Subject line), place the statement: subscribe bb
Configuration
Big Brother is installed to /usr/local/bb/. Unless otherwise specified, all paths in this article are relative to the this directory.Here is a list of some of the things you should do. Most of this list has been obtained from /usr/local/share/doc/bb/README.
- create a symbolic link from /usr/local/bb/www to somewhere within your webserver tree. On a default apache install, the following command will do this:
ln -w /usr/local/bb/www /usr/local/www/data/bbYou can then access the Big Brother output through the URL http://www.yourwebserver.org/bb/
- edit runbb.sh and ensure BBHOME is set like this: BBHOME="/usr/local/bb"
- modify ./etc/bb-hosts to contains the list of machines you wish to monitor. See /usr/local/share/doc/bb/README for the format of this file.
- After modifying the bb-hosts file, remember to run ./etc/bbchkhosts.sh to check for any errors.
- If you want web-based history, modify ./web/bb-hist.sh much the same way as you modified runbb.sh and copy it to your webserver’s CGI directory (in my case, /usr/local/www/cgi-bin/).
- Modify ./etc/bbdef.sh to specify how Big Brother reacts to various situations.
- In ./etc/bbwarnsetup.cfg you can specify who to email about various things. See the pagemaster token.
Running Big Brother
This is easy:./runbb.sh
The install creates the script /usr/local/etc/rc.d/bb.sh which will start Big Brother for you after each reboot.
Unfortunately BB makes active connections to each service it monitors, so you’ll get a ton of FTP errors showing up in syslog.
I had to disable big brother for this and a few other reasons.