mdbd

README

mdbd

The mdbd daemon is a companion to the dominator daemon. It queries one or more Machine DataBases and provides the dominator with information about machines (subs) to manage.

The daemon writes processed and filtered MDB data to a local file (/var/lib/Dominator/mdb by default) which the dominator can consume. Thus, both mdbd and dominator must run on the same machine.

Startup

Mdbd is started at boot time, usually by one of the provided init scripts. The mdbd process is baby-sat by the init script; if the process dies the init script will re-start it. It may be stopped with the command:

service mdbd stop

which also kills the baby-sitting init script. It may be started with the comand:

service mdbd start

There are many command-line flags which may change the behaviour of mdbd but many have defaults which should be adequate for most deployments. Built-in help is available with the command:

mdbd -h

Key configuration parameters

The init script reads configuration parameters from the /etc/default/mdbd file. The following is the minimum likely set of parameters that will need to be configured.

The USERNAME variable specifies the username that mdbd should run as. Since mdbd does not need root privileges, the init script runs mdbd as this user.

Configuration files

Mdbd requires "upstream" data sources. A configuration file (/var/lib/mdbd/mdb.sources.list by default) specifies the data sources to be collected from.

To directly query AWS for all running instances in a region, you would use the following configuration file. It will query all the accounts for which you have API keys in your ~/.aws/credentials file:

aws-local

An example configuration file which specifies to collect MDB data from CIS (Cloud Intelligence Service, being developed at Symantec) for the us-east-1 cluster is:

cis http://cis.us-east-1.aws.net:9200/aws/aws_nodes/_search?size=10000

Since CIS is built on top of Elastic Search, the configuration is primarily an Elastic Search query.