I had to deal with some of this when I recently wrote a BB agent to Nagios translator in Perl.
You should be able to send the information you want directly to BB using the IO::Socket module, connecting to port 1984( or whatever custom port) on your BB server and sending a status message. Big Brother status messages look like this (minus the hyphens, all one line): ------------ status hostname,domainname,com.cpu green Thu May 11 16:58:45 PDT 2006 [sfinfra1.ad.checkpoint.com] up: 21 days, 1 users, 46 procs, load=0%, PhysicalMem: 2560MB(33%) ------------ It basically breaks down to the following, separated by spaces on one line: status FQDN of host(with periods converted to commas).test_name color time stamp info (whatever's left of the line, including spaces) After the first line you may see more lines of verbose information, but for what you want to do you should only need the first line. -----Original Message----- From: Ken Foskey [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, May 14, 2006 4:45 AM To: beginners@perl.org Subject: net::ftp with retry & Big brother notifications from applications <snip> Secondly is there an easy way to send messages to Big Brother to go orange, red then go green again? We are using a file and writing messages and there is currently no way of deleting the messages once the process is fine again. There must be a better way. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>