There are quite a few addons you can find for Xymon, as it was forked from Big Brother software, which became commercial at some point. Most of the addons are compatible with Xymon and the biggest collection is here. There are also some addons found here. But my favorite is the admintools.
Those are the tools that make the web interface much more flexible and give you the option to edit configuration files and view some graphs from the browser, instead of having to SSH into the server every time. The problem is that while it worked great with my old 6.06 version of Ubuntu, the new 8.04.1 gave me nothing but trouble with these tools. It turns out that this addon is not maintained any longer. But thanks to my friend, the issue is resolved now and this is how you install it.
Upload it to the server, unpack and put every file according to the category hierarchy it’s in. Your Xymon directory is /usr/lib/hobbit.
chmod 755 all the new files.
Now here’s the trick. Since version 6.10 Ubuntu uses dash shell as a system shell, instead of bash, which was used with version 6.06. So what we need to do is change the
#!/bin/shline to
#!/bin/bashat the start of every .sh file that has it. This is to explicitly tell it to use the bash shell.
The files that need this change are all the adminscripts_* files that are in
/usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-bin/ and /usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-secure/directories.
Another thing that needs to be adjusted to the new Xymon version is the menu. Previous version used javascript, while the new version uses static html headers and footers. But call me lazy - I didn’t want to deal with it, so instead of rewriting the header and footer of the admintools, I decided to use the old style javascript menu only on those pages.
So what I did was edit the adminscripts_header file and change the menu.css to menu1.css. Afterwords I uploaded the old menu .js files and the old menu.css(renamed to menu1.css of course) to the /usr/lib/hobbit/server/www/menu/ directory. And since I’m such a good guy, I’m attaching the old menu directory:
menu
UPD1: Going by my own manual I realized I forgot a few things. You need to change the /etc/hobbit/web/menu.cfg to look like that. Also take a look at the adminscripts themselves as you might wanna edit them. For example, I edit the /usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-secure/adminscripts_edit_files.sh to include additional files I can edit (FILEX line). You will also need to chmod 777 the /etc/hobbit/* if you intend to edit them via web interface.
And last, but not least: the calendar. It’s a very nice feature added to the admintools, but somehow one of the variables is wrong. So what you should do is replace the BBWEBHOSTURL with BBSERVERWWWURL in every occurrence in /usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-bin/adminscripts_view_graph.sh and /usr/lib/hobbit/cgi-bin/adminscripts_view_notifications.sh (thanks, Evgeny:) )
I figured it’d be easier for me and you to just upload the whole thing already modified, but I believe it’s not that much work that has to be done, plus it’s better if you understand what you’re doing. Also, maybe someone out there will eventually fix the addon to work with the current menu and drop completely the javascript.
Now, to actually work with these tools and have other admin priveleges, you have to create a user:
sudo htpasswd -c /etc/hobbit/hobbitpasswd USERNAME
replace the USERNAME with your actual user, of course.
Before we move to actually configure the Xymon, there’s one small detail left. Like I said, the admintools was written for an older version of Hobbit, so if you use it as it is, the apache error.log will constantly complain about the “include” lines in the hobbitserver.cfg file. There are about 5 of those. To be honest, I never had the time to actually look into it, but the old version had all the variables configured in this very file, while in the new version some of them moved to other files, located in different places. The strangest thing is that those files are exactly where they’re supposed to be, but still apache complaints:
../server/etc/hobbitserver.cfg: line 68: include: command not found, referer: ...
What I did was just replace the “include” line with the variables found in those files and that was it. But I’m not sure what effect will that have in the future, so if any of you up to the task - please.
So let’s configure it a bit:
