Hobbit 4.0.3 released

Version 4.0.3 of the Hobbit Monitor was uploaded to sourceforge.net a few minutes ago.

This release adds a new maintenance script, native to Hobbit, so Hobbit no longer relies on any external tools for the core functionality.

Beginning with this release, Hobbit can no longer be used as an add-on to Big Brother. Hobbit retains compatibility with BB clients and extension scripts, but you can no longer run eg. the Hobbit network test tool and have it report to a Big Brother server.

All log files have been moved to the Hobbit log-directory, usually /var/log/hobbit/. If you have scripts that access these, you should change them or setup links for the old locations of the BBVAR/acks/* logfiles.

Commandline options for all of the CGI tools have been collected into a "hobbitcgi.cfg" file. If you have customized your CGI scripts with additional commandline options, you should put them into this file instead of modifying the CGI wrappers directly, to ease upgrading.

And of course, a number of bugs have been fixed. I am grateful to the people on the Hobbit mailing list for their great effort with reporting bugs, suggesting improvements and testing the early versions.

The changelog for this release is included below.

Regards, Henrik

Changes from 4.0.2 -> 4.0.3

Bugfixes (general):

• The bb-datepage and bbmessage CGI tools were reading the POST data in an incorrect way; it worked on most systems, but did not adhere to the CGI specification.

Bugfixes (alerting):

• Acknowledgments were broken in 4.0.2.
• Using PAGE=... in hobbit-alerts.cfg to pick out hosts on the front-page was not possible. The front page is now recognized with the name "/", so PAGE=/ will find them.
• The hobbitd_alert --test option would not pick up the correct page-path settings from the bb-hosts file.
• The BBALPHAMSG text passed to scripts as a default alert message now includes the URL link to the statuslog.

Bugfixes (graphs and trends):

• hobbitgraph.cgi could show "@RRDPARAM@" on graphs if it was matched by a NULL string (would happen for mailq graphs).
• RRD files were not being updated while a status was blue (disabled), even though status messages were received. Changed so that blue logs are passed off to the RRD
• The "disk1" graph definition failed to take into account that the numbers logged were already in KB of data. So the axis-label was wrong. parser - we might as well track data when it's there.
• The "mailq" RRD handler now finds the queue-length regardless of whether it is before or after the "requests" keyword in the "mailq" or "nmailq" status message.
• If the "apache" data collection was specified for a host, but the host had no "http" tests, a bogus http status report was being generated.
• Network statistics used a conversion that would overflow on 32-bit systems.

Bugfixes (web pages):

• Some header/footer files for the snapshot report were missing.
• The "info_header" and "info_footer" files were not being used for the "info" column pages.

Bugfixes (installation):

• Fix file-descriptor leak in the "setup-newfiles" tool used during installation. This could cause "make install" to abort while installing new files, on systems with a low setting for the max. number of simultaneous open files.
• Some systems keep libraries in a /lib64 directory - this was not being searched by the configure script.
• If Hobbit was built without SSL support and an SSL network test is configured, it will now always fail with a meaningful error message.
• If the configure script found SSL- or LDAP-libraries, but these could not link, the build would not disable SSL- and LDAP-support and therefore it failed. If the libraries do not work, disable the support.
• The SSL test would link without required network support libraries on some platforms.
• The options for overriding SSL- and LDAP-include files did not match the documented name.
• AIX systems built with gcc were missing the OSDEF compile- flags.

Improvements:

• All remnants of Big Brother compatibility have been removed. If you want to stick with the old Big Brother tool, use bbgen. This allowed for some much needed cleaning up of the bbgen code that loaded the status data, especially for the handling of purple status logs. Also, the sending of messages has dropped all support for the Big Brother method of sending "page" messages when a status-message is sent with an alert-color, so the BBPAGE and BBPAGERS settings are no longer used.
• The maint.pl script has been removed. A new tool, hobbit-enadis.cgi, replaces this with a native Hobbit tool. If you are upgrading, you should change the ~/server/www/menu/menu_items.js file to point link to "hobbit-enadis.sh" instead of "maint.pl".
• The "info" column page now includes a form to disable and enable tests for a single host. If you prefer not to have this on the info page, add the option "--no-disable" to the hobbit-cgi/bb-hostsvc.sh wrapper.
• Some logfiles have been moved to the normal log-file directory - /var/log/hobbit:
  • nkstatus.log (from ~hobbit/server/)
  • notifications.log (from ~hobbit/data/acks/)
  • acklog (from ~hobbit/data/acks), also renamed to acknowledge.log
• The hobbit-mailack CGI will now find a "delay=DURATION" line in the mail message, and use that as the duration of the acknowledgment. Reports show that there are some types of mail/SMS systems where you cannot modify the message subject.
• Paul D. Backer contributed "favicon" images generated from the Hobbit "recent" GIF files. These have been added and are now loaded from the Hobbit web/*_header files, so that browsers supporting this (Mozilla, Firefox) will display a favicon-image in the titlebar or on the page-tab holding the Hobbit webpage.
• Two new settings in hobbitserver.cfg can be used to restrict which filesystems are being tracked by Hobbit. The NORRDDISKS / RRDDISKS settings are regular-expressions that the filesystem names are matched against. See the hobbitserver.cfg(5) man-page.
• Hobbit now works with RRDtool 1.2.x. Due to a bug in the first 1.2.x releases of RRDtool, you must use at least version 1.2.2 with Hobbit.
• A new report-output option lets you save a CSV (comma- separated values) file with the availability data for each host+test in Hobbit. This allows for further processing of the availability data eg. importing it into a spreadsheet. This can be selected from the report request webpage.
• It is now possible to define different values for an environment setting in hobbitserver.cfg, depending on a new "--area=..." command-line option for all tools. See hobbitserver.cfg.
• Apache 1.x performance data are now graphed correctly, by mapping the "BusyServers/IdleServers" data into the BusyWorkers/IdleWorkers datasets used by Apache 2.0 RRD graphs.
• sendmail RRD's for sendmail 8.13+ now tracks the number of "quarantined" messages also. You must delete any existing sendmail.rrd files for this new data item to be tracked.
• All RRD-updates now use the RRDtool "--template" option to map values to RRD datasets. This should keep us from updating datasets with wrong values.
• Graphs can now get their title from a script, instead of using a static string in hobbitgraph.cfg. This lets you e.g. pick up the graphtitle from the mrtg.cfg.
• All CGI's now pick up commandline options from a new configuration file, hobbitcgi.cfg. This is to ease packaging and make sure the CGI's can be updated without losing local configurations.
• The debian- and rpm-specific packaging files are now included in the distribution tarfile.
• A historical status-log now includes a "Full History" button to go to the history overview.
• "irix" is now recognized as operating system. A preliminary vmstat RRD will be generated, but this may change in a future version. "netstat" reports are not yet handled.

-- Henrik Storner