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Highlights of the 4.3.0 version

list Sebastian Auriol
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:03:41 -0000
Message-Id: <!~!UENERkVCMDkAAQACAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAC4AAAAAAAAAvrTCuIsz1xGxNWiNbQAAAAEAUR1BVCzq0xGwsQCgzFqsgwAAAAGTZwAAEAAAABpNKCm8YodEm415/ZKbN3QBAAAAAA==@syntec.co.uk>

Henrik,

The new features sound good!  But are they now documented?  I checked the
snapshot and none of man pages or the Changes page seem to have been updated
since the 4.2.0 release.  It makes it quite difficult to test and use the
new features (which presumably is a requirement before releasing the new
version)! ;-)

Or am I missing something less obvious than using the source (TM)?

I think it would be useful if the Changes page
(http://www.hswn.dk/beta/snapshot/Changes) was kept more or less up-to-date
for the snapshot releases.  Knowing what has changed in hobbit-server betas
seems pretty difficult without downloading frequent snapshots and doing
diffs.  Is there any chance of the source being put into a public subversion
/ CVS repository or something?  I see there is already a public CVS
repository for hobbit on SourceForge, but it only includes the hobbit-client
code
  A public repository may encourage more contributed patches.

I also see that last year you mentioned that you are "using RCS which is a
predecessor to CVS".  I don't know if this is still the case, but if so, it
appears pretty simple to migrate to CVS using rcs2cvs as documented here:
http://www.linuxdocs.org/HOWTOs/CVS-RCS-HOWTO-3.html
Or as the OP did in http://www.nabble.com/RCS-to-svn-t792119.html - he
migrated RCS to SVN via CVS.

Many thanks,

Sebastian 


user-ce4a2c883f75@xymon.invalid (Henrik Stoerner) wrote on Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:08:12
+0200:
In another thread, someone asked about what new features are planned for
version 4.3.0. I've summarized them below; they have all been
implemented by now. Some of them have been contributed by others over
the past year - I'm pleased to have finally gotten their patches merged.

There are some open bug-reports, and the plan now is to try and get
those fixed. Once that is done I'll ask you all to start testing the
beta-versions, and then a new release is hopefully available soon.

This doesn't mean that I won't consider adding new stuff before the
4.3.0 release, but right now the plan is to get 4.3.0 shipped with
the current set of features. But if I've missed someone's favourite
patch or feature request, do let me know.


Major new features
* PAGE setting for alert- and client-configuration handles hosts on
 multiple pages, so any pagename can be used.
* Flap detection of statuses that change color rapidly. The status
 is kept at the most critical level until it stops flapping.
* Holiday support for alerts, including variable holidays (Easter etc)
* Split NCV support - graph data from NCV can be split into multiple
 RRD databases allowing for varying number of datasets.
* RRD database parameters are now configurable (i.e. number of 
 datapoints stored, whether to store min/max values etc). Note that
 this only applies to newly created RRD files, not existing ones.
* Distributed worker modules allow sharing the load across multiple
 Hobbit servers
* RRD updates are now cached for up to 30 minutes before being written
 to disk. This makes the I/O load on large installations much lighter.
* Detection of statuses that are reported by multiple hosts
* Client backend-support for the z/OS and z/VSE clients by Rich Smirna

Display things
* Graph zooming now limits the lower/upper bounds of a graph (requires
 rrdtool 1.2.x)
* The trends page default data-period can be configured to something
 other than the default 48-hour view, and the user can select a
 different period on-the-fly.
* Hosts can be sorted automatically on the overview webpage with a
 "group-sorted" group definition.
* NOCOLUMNS setting in bb-hosts let you suppress certain columns on
 a per-host basis
* Host-comments are displayed as tool-tips, to save screen space.

Checks and graphs
* Network tests can use a specific source IP instead of the default
* The validity-period of network tests is configurable, instead of
 being fixed at the default 30-minute setting
* Client file checks can check for a symlink
* "trends" report for RRD handling allows generating custom-made
 RRD files
* Hobbit host- and status-counts are tracked in an RRD file

Miscellaneous
* NCV reports can handle color-icons before the name:value data
* hobbitlaunch tasks can be configured to run on certain hosts only
* Time-warp detection and warning
* Local unix-socket interface to Hobbit daemon
* hobbitd_capture can collect several statuses and hand off such a
 batch to an external command
* Support for SHA-224/256/384/512 digests


Regards,
Henrik