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TITLE=Release Notes DESCRIPTION=special things to look out for
in this release KEYWORDS=release,notes,warnings DOCTOP=index
DOCPREV=index DOCNEXT=bugs SECTION=Release Notes
Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0a3
It's always a good idea to run the check-config manpage 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 the alerter manpage) from the alert-sending (see the alert-email manpage and the alert-winpopup manpage).
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 the unix-status-server manpage'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: the new-config manpage 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 the convert-config-
links manpage script BEFORE INSTALLING THIS VERSION
New Features
- the new the datapage-status manpage 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 the availability-report manpage and
availability-report.cgi and config-file
availability for reporting on "availability".
- New the nt-status-server manpage and the nt-status-collector manpage and RRDs for them
(ntactivity, ntmemory, ntpaging, ntnetwork and ntlogicaldisk-*).
- New the cleanup manpage program to remove stale files.
- New the new-snmp-hosts manpage now adds other rrds than snmpif-*
- New the new-unix-hosts manpage program to add hosts which are running the
the unix-status-server manpage 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.
- the run-remstats manpage 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 always wanting.
- new the nt-discover manpage 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 the view-writer
manpage 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 the port-collector manpage 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 the snmpif-description-updater manpage 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, the split-config manpage, 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 the run-remstats
manpage 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 the collectors manpage, the monitors manpage and the
pagemakers manpage 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 Mon Sep 10 15:18:27 EDT 2001 by <thomas.erskine@sourceworks.com>.
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