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bbwatcher

Bbwatcher is a project mainly written in PYTHON and PERL, it's free.

The BBWatcher is a Perl/Python server/client application to relay monitoring events directly to a user's desktop from either Big Brother or Xymon.

README file for Big Brother Watcher Client

About

The Watcher is an event receiving client for Windows or Unix, written in Python. It can receive events from either Big Brother or Xymon monitoring servers.

Prerequisites

Python 2.4 and wxPython 2.6.

How to install

If you're reading this, it's already installed! On Windows, there should be a shortcut on your desktop as well as on the Start menu. On Unix, just run the "aacd.py" script.

When you launch the client, it opens the log window. All event data is written in an unfomatted but readable form with local system timestamps:

You can hide the window by either selecting the Hide options from the system tray menu or just double-clicking the systray icon.

Configuration

One of the main features of the client is the ability to decide which type of alerts you want to see, based on the color and Priority level (Only available in Hobbit) of each event. Right now, the client assumes that you have configured a Priority level for every alert it will see. The server end takes care of determining this, and anything without a PRIO is shown as "NA". All "NA" events are allowed through the filter. (See ToDO list)

You can either edit the watcher.conf file in the program directory, or use the Settings menu option to change the client options.

License

Big Brother Watcher is copyrighted (C) 2006 by Matthew Epp and Brent Scott.

Big Brother Watcher is Open Source software, made available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

Support

Try the project forum on: http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbwatcher/

Changes

v0.0.0 [2006.08.01] - First test version. v0.0.1 [2006.08.10] - First fully functioning version. v0.1.0 [2006.09.18] - Many fixes and new features. Made the event pop-up clickable with a URL link to the web page with the alert data. Created a settings window with many new options. Improved handling of minimizing app to the system tray. v0.1.1 [2006.09.21] - More fixes. Better connection handling. v0.2.0 [2008.11.01] - Completely rewrote the server code to utilize the Net::Server module. Overhauled the client code to get rid of deprecated calls. Improved the connection functions so now it will try to reconnect if the server goes down. Fixed a lot of bugs. v0.2.1 [2008.11.06] - Now every color alert has its own sound associated with it.

ToDo

  • Add filter options for "NA" Priority levels, for compatability with older Big Brother.
  • Create authentication scheme between client and server.
  • Track the overall color of the BB/Hobbit page and change the icon bitmap to reflect that. (Stays red all the time right now)

Known Bugs

Keep in mind that this is very alpha software, and as such, I haven't checked it thoroughly for bugs yet. Bug reports are welcome in the Bugs section of the project page. I'll try to list a few of the more major ones here to avoid redundent reports.

  • [Linux] There is a graphical glitch in the alert pop-up window. The background color of the panel does not show in a boxed area around the alert text. ? If the log window is displayed but not active, the pop-up alerts do not appear above other windows. I could force this behavoir, but I should make it optional, as stealing your window focus can be rather annoying.
  • Some "invalid window handle" errors appear in the log window after closing the About dialog.
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