spooling event in BB

Why spooling event ?

As bb is installed on all our server, we use it to collect information for different purpose (store event in a rdbms after treatment, keep them in another directory, ...)

In a first time we've used the way used by larrd (parse each 5 minutes the bbvar/logs directory) but that's not a good idea as :

• some treatment are hourly/daily (so we need to do a copy and hourly we launch our program) ;
• we want to be able to just spool some information (no need to really use them in BB) ;
• it's easier to treat one event/one file than using the "notes" directives.

Now, we use this method for one year and we are very happy :-).

How it works

• I've modified bb so that it write all events in a spool directory under the name "server.eventname.actualtimestamp" ;
• The spool dir is defined in the env var SPOOL. If this var is undef, no spool is done ;
• bbd read the file etc/bbdontspool and never spool event type defined in it;
• I've added a spool directive to be able to just spool some events.

Installing this patch

1. download last spool files ;
2. save your bb/src/ ;
3. untar it in bb/src/ ;
4. patch your bbd.c :

   patch < bbd.c.spool
   

5. rebuild and install :

   $ make
   $ make install
   

6. define the SPOOL env var in bbinc.sh for example. Add for example in bbinc.sh just after the BBVAR definition :

   BBVAR=$BBTOP/bbvar
   # If you want a different BBVAR just modify the next line and uncomment
   # BBVAR=/some/directory/structure
   
   BBLOGS="${BBVAR}/logs"     # WHERE THE LOG FILES LIVE
   BBHISTLOGS="${BBVAR}/histlogs"   # WHERE THE HISTLOG FILES LIVE
   BBHIST="${BBVAR}/hist"     # WHERE THE HIST FILES LIVE
   BBDATA="${BBVAR}/data"     # WHERE THE DATA FILES LIVE (data message type)
   BBACKS="${BBVAR}/acks"     # WHERE THE ACKS/NOTIF LOGS  LIVE
   BBDISABLED="${BBVAR}/disabled"   # WHERE THE DISABLE TAG FILES  LIVE
   
   export BB BBHOSTS BBDFTAB BBCPUTAB BBPROCTAB BBEXTTAB BBMSGSTAB BBNOTES
   export BBREP BBTOP BBVAR BBLOGS BBHISTLOGS BBHIST BBDATA BBACKS BBDISABLED
   
   BBSPOOL="${BBVAR}/spool"              # ADD THIS LINE
   export BBSPOOL                        # AND THIS ONE
   

   and create this directory.
7. restart bb.

Using it

• If you don't want to spool some events, just create a file BB/etc/bbdontspool and put all extensions you don't want to spool :

  % cat etc/bbdontspool 
  parameters
  errpt
  C3PO
  datafiles
  dbspace
  export
  

• If you want to just spool some event, replace the status keyword by the spool keyword :

  bb BBDISP "spool www,bb4,com.backup green `date` Backup Successful"
  

  This message will be just spooled.

Author, suggestion

Nicolas Chuche

All suggestions welcome

Even if we use it for one year, this patch is provided as-is...