A slight clarification on my earlier message: the HTML versions of man pages haven't been updated since the 4.2.0 release, but the actual man pages have. I did end up doing a source diff of some man pages against 4.2.0 to see what had changed and how to use some of the new features... So the situation is better than I feared.
I'm not sure whether you saw my previous message, Henrik?
Sebastian
From: Sebastian [mailto:spa at syntec.co.uk] Sent: 30 November 2007 17:04 To: hobbit at hswn.dk Subject: [hobbit] RE: Highlights of the 4.3.0 version
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> 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> 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> http://www.nabble.com/RCS-to-svn-t792119.html - he migrated RCS to SVN via CVS.
Many thanks,
Sebastian
henrik (at) hswn.dk (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