How To Install hobbit-plugins on Debian 12

Learn how to install hobbit-plugins on Debian 12 with this tutorial. hobbit-plugins is plugins for the Xymon network monitor

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install hobbit-plugins on Debian 12.

What is hobbit-plugins

hobbit-plugins is:

This package provides plugins for the Xymon network monitor. (Formerly called Hobbit.)

Included client plugins:

  • apt - check for outstanding updates (uses aptitude and dctrl-tools if installed)
  • backuppc - check for errors reported by BackupPC servers (needs backuppc and sudo)
  • cciss - check hardware RAIDs in HP ProLiant servers (needs cciss-vol-status and sudo)
  • cntrk - check the size of the Netfilter Connection Tracking table. (needs libfile-slurp-perl)
  • dirtyetc - check for conffiles which are modified compared to Debian’s defaults but should not be (needs sudo and debsums, supports dphys-config)
  • dirtyvcs - check for dirty VCS working copies (supports Git, Mercurial, Bzr and Subversion, needs appropriate VCS packages and libfile-which-perl installed)
  • dnsq - checks for working DNS on clients (needs libnet-dns-perl and libfile-slurp-perl)
  • entropy - check kernel entropy pool size
  • ipmi - read IPMI sensors and event log (needs ipmitool)
  • kern - check for outdated running kernel and need for reboot (needs binutils, libfile-slurp-perl and libsort-naturally-perl)
  • libs - check for running processes with upgraded libraries (needs lsof, sudo and libyaml-tiny-perl)
  • mailman - checks the existence of Mailman shunt files and aged queue files. (needs sudo)
  • mdstat - check for failed or resyncing RAID devices
  • megaraid - check state of LSI MegaRAID SAS controllers (uses xynagios, see below, and additionally needs megaclisas-status from https://hwraid.le-vert.net/wiki/DebianPackages and sudo)
  • mq - check (postfix’s) mail queue (needs libtimedate-perl)
  • misc - meta plugin for running series of scripts (needs libipc-run-perl)
  • net - check network interface states (needs libfile-which-perl, libfile-slurp-perl, libipc-run-perl, libyaml-tiny-perl, either iproute2 or net-tools and optionally ethtool).
  • ntpq - check the ntpd daemon synchronization status (needs ntp)
  • postgres - statistics graphs for PostgreSQL databases (needs libdbd-pg-perl)
  • sftbnc - check if the local Postfix MTA has soft_bounce enabled.
  • temp - simple temperature monitor (needs libfile-which-perl and libyaml-tiny-perl; depending on the hardware to monitor it optionally also needs hddtemp, smartmontools, libxml-twig-perl, nvidia-smi (non-free), sudo)
  • yum - check for outstanding updates on RPM based distros (not usable on Debian and derivatives).

Included server plugins:

  • aptdiff - monitor list of installed packages in host pools
  • conn6 - check IPv6 connectivity (needs fping)
  • ircbot - relay status changes to IRC (needs libpoe-component-irc-perl)
  • pgbouncer - monitor pool usage and traffic
  • tftp - checks TFTP servers by downloading a file from them (needs libnet-tftp-perl)
  • xcl - checks Lenovo XClarity remote management API for hardware failure events (needs libmojolicious-perl and libyaml-tiny-perl)

Helper software:

  • Hobbit.pm: Perl module for writing plugins
  • xynagios: adaptor for running Nagios plugins with Xymon (needs libipc-run-perl)

As not all plugins are needed by everyone, hard dependencies of plugins enabled by default are listed in the Recommends field of the package and dependencies of plugins disabled by default or optional dependencies of single plugins are listed in the Suggests field – as common with many “collection” style Debian packages. The dependencies of each plugin are listed above in parentheses.

There are three methods to install hobbit-plugins on Debian 12. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install hobbit-plugins Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install hobbit-plugins using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install hobbit-plugins

Install hobbit-plugins Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install hobbit-plugins using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install hobbit-plugins

Install hobbit-plugins Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install hobbit-plugins using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install hobbit-plugins

How To Uninstall hobbit-plugins on Debian 12

To uninstall only the hobbit-plugins package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove hobbit-plugins

Uninstall hobbit-plugins And Its Dependencies

To uninstall hobbit-plugins and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 12, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove hobbit-plugins

Remove hobbit-plugins Configurations and Data

To remove hobbit-plugins configuration and data from Debian 12 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge hobbit-plugins

Remove hobbit-plugins configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove hobbit-plugins configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge hobbit-plugins

Dependencies

hobbit-plugins have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install hobbit-plugins package on Debian 12 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.