1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461
|
TITLE=Release Notes DESCRIPTION=special things to look out for in this
release KEYWORDS=release,notes,warnings DOCTOP=index
DOCPREV=architecture DOCNEXT=bugs SECTION=Release Notes
Release Notes
Note: These release notes do not cover the usual install, just
differences from previous version, new features and special procedures
involved in upgrading from one version to another. In other words, this
isn't a short-cut, it's more stuff you've got to read. Sorry.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.13a
Bug Fixes
Significant changes
Dropped graph-writer from distribution. If you've already moved to using
run_remstats2, you'll already be using page-writer instead. If not,
switch now.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.12b
Bug Fixes
- Problem with time-sync for remstats servers fixed, see item 198 in
done. Unless all your hosts running remstats servers are time
synchronized, you need this release. I guess that's why I never ran into
this before. :-)
Changes
- If you're upgrading, you should switch from run-remstats to
run-remstats2. The former will be going away soon and the latter is much
more flexible.
- moved the default location of the datapage directory. If you don't
change yours, then all the pagemakers will run every time, which is bad.
Edit your "general" config-file and change "datapagedir" to something
outside /home/remstats/etc/config. The new default is
"/home/remstats/data/DATAPAGES", which you should probably use unless
you have reasons to do otherwise. Then move
/home/remstats/etc/config/datapages to /home/remstats/data/DATAPAGES, or
wherever you decided to put it.
- replaced the remoteping rrd with remoteping-*, allowing one RRD per
remoteping-server host.
- renamed "cleanup" to remstats-cleanup to avoid name collisions. Make
sure that you change the remstats user's crontab.
New Features
- new docs section on troubleshooting. Check it out and suggest
additions.
- check-rrdlast will show the last-update times for all RRDs and
optionally the data for that last update.
- new error-collector to count errors/aborts in the other collectors and
thus allow alerts based on this.
- new alert-syslog alert-sender to log alerts to syslog
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.11b
all configuration files/directories will be checked to see if the
configuration has changed, to determine if run-remstats needs to run the
pagemakers.
New rt-updater program to watch info on a specified host+RRD+graph in
near real-time. It's not well integrated with everything else, but it's
still usefull for testing.
New program-collector to run external programs to supply values for
RRDs, written by Arnauld Michelizza.
All the collectors now honor a stop file. If there is a file in the
configuration-specified tempdir called "STOP-programname", then the
collector called "programname" will exit after reading its
configuration. This is more for debugging, but there may be other
reasons to use it. This is similar to the feature in run-remstats and
run-remstats2.
New show-config.cgi to allow configuration browsing. No editing. Also,
it's incomplete, but it does do the important pieces: hosts, and rrds
and what they refer to. However, it's not secure, in that it may reveal
too much, such as SNMP community strings. Make very sure that you
control access to it.
"Make install" now will make default htpasswd and htgroup files for use
with apache's htpasswd feature, if it can find an "htpasswd" program in
the path. These will also be used by the new access_control routine
which will be used to control access to all the cgis.
"configure" will now do proper checking for required and optional perl
modules. Missing required modules will abort "configure"; missing
optional modules will mark the files which require them so that they
won't be syntax checked (which would fail).
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.10b
If you see this version, you're really fast. Please remove it and take
1.0.11b instead.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.9b
Note: There is a new target in the Makefile: "upgrade". It's supposed to
do the required changes for folks who are upgrading from previous
versions. It won't work for upgrading from versions before 1.0.4a. It
has NOT been exhaustively tested, especially for earlier versions. If
the install target notices that the configuration directory exists, it
will try to do the upgrade for you. To use it manually:
BACKUP YOUR CURRENT CONFIGURATION!
make all
make upgrade
make install
...
New Features
The new run-remstats2 program replaces run-remstats. It also brings two
more config-files run and run-stages. This permits "run-remstats2" to be
completely configurable in what programs get run. This can be used to
run more processes in parallel, but intelligently divided, to permit the
run to complete more quickly.
[UPGRADE] If you are upgrading, this will require you to do the
following, before doing the install:
mkdir /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run-stages
ln -s /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run /home/remstats/etc/config/run
ln -s /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run-stages /home/remstats/etc/config/run-stages
The new "headerfile" directive for the hosts config-file permits you in
inject arbitrary information into the host header.
The new "currentvalue" directive for the rrds config-dir permits you to
store the current value of variables in status files in the host's data
directory. Particularly useful in conjunction with the "headerfile"
directive. Can also be used to permit other processes to act on values
collected by the collectors.
A new section, "sar", for the unix-status-server. This runs ""sar -A""
and parses the result. Unfortunately, there is no consistency about what
data is available or when the various items should be called, so the
RRDs are OS-specific.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.8a
Another minor release.
New Features
Added "--with-perl=xxx" option to "configure" in case you need a
specific version of perl for some reason.
Added "HTMLDIR", "CGIDIR" and "CGIURL" to the list of magic cookies
substituted.
New programs port-query and pattern-query for testing scripts used by
the port-collector.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.7a
Another minor release. This one gets rid of GIFs and replaces them by
png files.
Also some minor bug-fixes.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.6a
Oops. There was a small glitch in the install for 1.0.5a. Here's a fixed
version.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.5a
- [UPGRADE] If you're upgrading from a previous version of remstats,
you'll have to:
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/ntops /home/remstats/etc/config
after the install of the new version, even though it's effectively
empty and you're not using the new ntop-collector (yet). See below
for more pointers on it.
- [UPGRADE] You'll need to do the following to accomodate the new
page-writer:
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/pages /home/remstats/etc/config/pages
mkdir /home/remstats/etc/config/page-templates
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/page-templates/* /home/remstats/etc/config/page-templates
after the install of the new version.
- [UPGRADE] The host "tags" directive, has been renamed to "keys" to
avoid completely confusing me.
- [UPGRADE] The new "environment" config-file requires you to:
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/environment /home/remstats/etc/config
after the install of the new version.
- The collectors now all will use configuration-supplied IP numbers, if
they are there, in preference to looking the host-name up in DNS. If you
find an instance of this not happening, it's a bug.
New Features
- RRD config-files can now (like host config-files) have "keys"
associated with them. This was mainly added for the new page-writer, but
could be of other use.
- graph-writer has been replaced by page-writer, which writes directory
trees of pages from simple templates. The original look of the pages
graph-writer created has been re-created with 8 templates totalling 94
lines. Other completely different interfaces can now be created.
- macinfo a script (and cgi) to look up MAC addresses from an ethernet
switch via SNMP and show, for each port on the switch, which host is on
that port (by MAC address or IP number or domain-name, or a
combination). The related script update-switch-ports will also update
the description of each interface on the switch, with the host which is
connected to it.
- The unix-status-server has some new sections to make available various
data from /proc under linux, including disk I/O, memory, ...
- alert-monitor get some new relations: <daystddev, <weekstddev
<monthstddev (to compare standard-deviations), |> |< (absolute value
comparisons), delta>, delta< (change comparisons).
- the links config-file now has a more flexible definition and all the
links are now configurable.
- the lockfile script and remstats-backup which uses it.
- the hosts config-file has a new directive "tags" to allow processing
of sub-sets of all hosts.
- The new ntop-collector, configured by the ntops config-file, allows
you to collect stats on protocol usage distribution.
- The graph.cgi script now allows the time-span to be user-specified,
and also the graph width and height.
- All the collectors now accept "-H", "-G" and "-T" flags to allow them
to be run on subsets of all hosts, for an explicit list of hosts ("-H"),
all hosts in a list of groups ("-G"), or hosts which have a particular
tag ("-T").
- A new dbi-collector to collect information from remote databases. Look
at the rrd "dbitest1" for an example of how to create your own.
- A new config-file environment to set up the environment for children
of run-remstats.
- The log-server implements a new function "lastof" to permit it to
match patterns, while maintaining state from previous runs. See the RRD
"nfsproblems" for an example.
- A new utility remstats-rrdtune to tune all the RRD files to match the
remstats RRD definitions. Or as much tuning as rrdtool will do. The big
one that you probably wanted, mucking with archives, it doesn't do.
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.00a4
[There is no version 1.00a3.]
It's always a good idea to run check-config after changing any of the
config-files, but it's also a good idea to run it after doing an
upgrade, especially when, as in this version, there are changes to the
config-files.
Mostly small new features and bug-fixes, except:
- Incompatible: re-written alert-sending mechanism. Permits easily
written new methods of sending alerts, by separating the alert-text
generation (see alerter) from the alert-sending (see alert-email and
alert-winpopup). The new alert-destination-map config-file permits
mapping an alert-destination to different addresses depending on the
time-of-day, day-of-week, ... and its alias facility permits sending to
a list of addresses which may use different methods of sending the
alert.
- Incompatible: The unix-status-server's do_df now returns bytes not
K-bytes. This avoids silliness in the graphs saying that you've got 20k
kbytes free. It may have been correct, but it wasn't intuitive. You can
multiply all the old numbers by 1000 to convert RRDs.
- Warning: new-config now copies the configuration files which you are
likely to change, so that your changes won't be overwritten by an update
to remstats. Unfortunately, as all updates (including this one) will
overwrite config-base, so people upgrading from a previous version of
remstats should convert the following files from symlinks to config-base
into copies of those files:
alerts alert-destination-map general html links tools
You can do this by running the supplied convert-config-links script
BEFORE INSTALLING THIS VERSION
New Features
- the new datapage-status script generates datapages for each host,
which will show the current values of all rrd variables. There is a new
tool in the default tools config-file which will show this page, and
it's been added to the defaults generated by the new-xxx-hosts programs.
- Host templates. So that you can configure similar hosts like:
desc whatever
template their-template
Can also be used to make changing some things for many hosts easier.
E.G., you could have a template, say "default-nt-status-server"
which contained:
nt-status-server some-host
and configure all hosts which use c<some-host> like:
template default-nt-status-server
- New availability-report and availability-report.cgi and config-file
availability for reporting on "availability".
- New nt-status-server and nt-status-collector and RRDs for them
(ntactivity, ntmemory, ntpaging, ntnetwork and ntlogicaldisk-*).
- New cleanup program to remove stale files.
- New new-snmp-hosts now adds other rrds than snmpif-*
- New new-unix-hosts program to add hosts which are running the
unix-status-server with the apropriate rrds.
- ought to work with perl 5.6 now. I'm not using perl 5.6 on the main
collector yet, but it seems to install correctly on a test system.
- run-remstats now checks all configuration sub-directories to figure
out if anything has changed, so you ought to be able to just edit files
and the changes will get caught on the next run.
- remstats internal instrumentation allows monitoring remstats
collectors, for now. More later. Look at the pseudo-host _remstats_.
- removed old Overall Index, since I never looked at it, and wrote a new
RRD Index, which I was wanting.
- new nt-discover program to discover and add NT systems
Note: this adds the new discovery config-file which must be locally
configured. I won't even attempt to guess at values here.
- The old "alertflag" entry in the html config-file has been replaced by
three new entries: "alertflagcritical", "alertflagerror" and
"alertflagwarn", allowing e.g. different colors for the different levels
of alert.
- datapage.cgi now does variable substitution properly for HTML macros.
See the example datapage upss.page under
/home/remstats/etc/config/datapages.
- datapage.cgi and dataimage.cgi have two new commands: "alertstatus"
and "alertvalue" to fetch alert statuses and values. To be used on
forthcoming status pages.
Release Notes for Remstats version 0.13.1
I fixed a minor buglet in 0.13.0 which was noticed shortly after
release. I was annoyed enough with it that I made 0.13.1.
Release Notes for Remstats version 0.13.0 (AKA 0.12.2)
There are lots of little improvements, which are detailed in the Change
History, which I'm not going into here. The main incompatible changes
are:
- The configuration structure ($main::config) now has the graphs stored
under $main::config{RRD}{$wildrrd}{GRAPH} instead of
$main::config{GRAPH}, so there won't be problems with having the same
graph-name defined under two different rrds. This will only affect you
if you've been writing your own code for remstats, like a new
page-maker. I thought that the bug was annoying enough and difficult to
figure out when it was triggered that the incompatibility was worth the
change.
- After typing $main::config{CUSTOMGRAPH} instead of
$main::config{CUSTOM} one too many times, I renamed
$main::config{CUSTOM} to $main::config{CUSTOMGRAPH} which is what it
should have been all along. Again, this should only affect you if you've
been writing your own remstats code, like a new page-maker.
- Changed default location for datapages to
/home/remstats/etc/config/datapages, so that all the configuration,
including the datapages are together.
- Removed the general config-file directive "pagesas" since all the
generated pages are CGIs now. Check-config will abort if you still have
it. Just delete that line in the general config-file.
- "use strict" in all the scripts (unless I missed some) in preparation
for perl 5.6, which doesn't like "use vars". Shouldn't bother you unless
you've been writing remstats code, in which case, you probably know what
to do.
- To deal with alert templates (see below), you'll need to manually fix
your config-dirs. For each one, you need to:
su remstats
cd your-config-dir
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/alert-template-map .
mkdir alert-templates
cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/alert-templates/* alert-templates
- remoteping-collector has been modified to return the server-name
instead of a number to differentiate the data from different servers.
There's also a new remoteping-* wildcard RRD to make it more usefull.
Customgraphs on host-index pages
The new "customgraph graphname" directive for host config-files permits
you to add a customgraph to a host-index page. (Thanks Marek.)
graph.cgi - remstats graphs anywhere
Like it says, using the new graph.cgi, you can put remstats graphs on
any page you want.
Views
You can now define your own pages with page-layout of your choice using
views. (Thanks to Marek and Thorsten and Matt and anyone else I've
forgotten.) Don't forget to add view-writer to the list of pagemakers if
you've changed the default.
ping-* rrd
You can now ping different interfaces on a host separately (Thanks
Steve)
fileage section for unix-status-server
This allows you to fetch the last-modification-time for specified files.
It was written to allow remstats to monitor lock-files to check for
stale locks. There is no included rrd using it as lock-files are all
over the place.
port-collector can collect data from results
The port-collector has always been able to send a string to remote
services to that it could tell if they were working correctly. Now it
can pull values for RRDs and status-files from the results as well. I've
included a sample rrd (weathernetwork) and script (weathernetwork) to
collect current weather data for Ottawa. Look at the updated docs for
scripts config-files.
new script - snmpif-description-updater
The snmpif-description-updater will keep the descriptions on snmpif-*
RRDs up-to-date with whatever you've set as ifAlias for that interface.
(Thanks Steve Francis.)
Alert Templates
This feature allows you to customize the alert messages by addressee or
by RRD. Look at the docs in alert-template-map and alert-templates.
Autoconf-like configure
You can now do:
./configure
make
make install
for the beginning of of the install.
===========================================================
Release Notes for Remstats version 0.12.1
Ideally, this document will only have to tell you about the great new
features of remstats in this version.
Not this time.
In addition, due to various stuff (read the Change History), this covers
changes since version 0.11.1.
Configuration File Replaced by Configuration Directory
The old "one huge configuration file" has been replaced by a directory
of files and sub-directories. (See the new configuration docs for
details.) This means that most programs don't need to read and parse
everything, including stuff that they're not going to use. It also makes
it easier to find things, as you can go directly to the file that has
what you want, e.g. details on a particular host. It also made possible
the newly revamped replacements for "make-ping-hosts", "make-port-hosts"
and "make-snmp-hosts", which will insert their additions directly into
the appropriate configuration files.
There is a new script, split-config, which will take your old
config-file and a new name and generate a new config-dir from it.
On a related note, I broke the groups line out of the "general"
config-file into its own file. It's easier to see what you've got.
"split-config" will do this for you. Also the (undocumented) [html]
section will absorb large portions of the [general] section which really
belong to wep-page generation.
If you've made your own collector, you'd better look at the new
skeleton-collector for the required changes. Just change "read_config"
to "read_config_dir", with extra args. There's also documentation on how
to write your own collector.
do-remstats replaced by run-remstats
The old "do-remstats" shell-script and all the kludgy shell-scripts that
went with it and the "watchdog" and "lockfile" scripts have all gone
away. The replacement run-remstats does everything they did and does it
correctly. It's also configurable, so you don't need to modify the
scripts to change which collectors you want to run, e.g.
A new feature of "run-remstats" configurability is that you can have it
run the "ping-collector" before everything else and not bother trying
hosts that didn't answer it. You can also choose which collectors,
monitors and pagemakers to run.
CGI scripts and non-default config-dirs
At the moment, the supplied CGI scripts don't deal with non-default
config-dirs. I do consider this to be a problem, but I need to get this
release out to deal with other serious installation problems.
You can work-around this by editing the installed CGI scripts and
putting in the correct definition for $config_dir, near the top.
plugin-collector is gone
It was an inefficient, difficult-to-configure, kludge and isn't needed
anymore with the new run-remstats.
pre-release testing automated
You won't see it, but I hope you'll all notice the improvement in
release quality.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Last updated Wed May 28 11:54:44 EDT 2003 by <terskine@users.sourceforge.net>.
|