System Monitoring with Xymon/Other Docs/HOWTO/Clientupdate utility

The clientupdate utility is a way to distribute new clients to machines without logging into each of them, it can also be used to update certain settings i.e. The IP address of the server that the client reports to.

Making the new client

First it is best to create the new client, all you have to do it log onto a machine of the right platform etc. that the new client will be distributed to and compile the client as normal for instructions. Once you have the client set up you, copy it to another directory (i.e. /tmp/hobbit_client, you need to tar it from the lowest directory (the one that contains etc/ bin/ etc.) tar only the files you want distributed to all the other machines i.e. delete items from the logs/ and tmp/ directories and maybe some binaries, the only thing that does make clients imcompatible are the compiled binaries so you can just delete them and distribute to any and all platforms as the rest of the hobbit client is made up primarily of scripts.

The tar'd client then needs to be moved to the hobbit server to INSTALL_DIR/server/download and made accessible to hobbit (chmod), note: you cannot compress the client! it must end in .tar

Setting up the server

Now that you have the tar'd client that you want to distribute you must tell the server which clients need to download it. The way this is achieved is that each time a client reports to hobbit it receives a clientversion, unless clientupdate is used this clientversion is a null value, so the client knows not to do anything. To change this you need to alter client-local and under the platform, machine name etc. you put the clientversion you wish the client to acquire for example:

[rhes]
log:/var/adm...
clientversion:server_move

[hostname]
log:/var/adm...
clientversion:hobbit_server

note: you do not include the .tar at the end of the client version.

Just sit and wait

After you have told the server which machines need which client and made the appropriate clients you just need to give hobbit time to report to the server and download the file, the rest is done automatically it usually takes 10-20 minutes, but I suggest you wait longer as clients report at different times, take more/less time to download the file etc. so for instance if you were changing the IP address for the server to something else and wanted the clients to reflect this fact I would recommend leaving it for approximately 1 hour before altering the server itself. There are no guarantees that every client will be updated, it depends on the settings in client-local.cfg, permissions on the machine etc. but you should get about a 90+% success rate, the others you can alter manually and make a note so that you can work on adding them into client-local and/or alter permissions so that the client updates automatically next time.