bbnt2ns

I recently had the opportunity to try out bbnt2ns, a Perl script designed to act as a middleman between the Big Brother NT client and Netsaint. The way it works is by listening for and capturing messages from the client and then passing them along to Netsaint as a passive service check. This program is versatile enough to work on Windows 2000 in addition to other operating systems.

I was thrilled to discover that bbnt2ns also works seamlessly with Nagios, the updated version of Netsaint. All that needs to be done is to adjust the location of the external command file in the script, typically "/usr/local/nagios/var/rw/nagios.cmd", to point to the Nagios directory. You can then expect the same syntax to be used for both Nagios and Netsaint. Christoph Weinandt deserves a round of applause for putting bbnt2ns to the test with Nagios.

Furthermore, I have a great example of a Nagios service definition that takes advantage of bbnt2ns. Here is what it looks like:

define service {
host_name myhost
service_description cpu
active_checks_enabled 0
check_command ping
}

It's important to remember to set the active_checks_enabled feature to zero to keep the check_command from conflicting with the passive checks that bbnt2ns executes. Special thanks to Clay Fandre for providing us with this configuration example and for testing bbnt2ns with Nagios.

As for the latest version of bbnt2ns: a bug that was preventing the script from updating a netsaint.cmd in version 0.7 has been fixed. This occurred because netsaint.cmd evolved into a named pipe.