J.C., Thank you again J.C. for reviving the updates for Xymon. I am willing to help update it as well, even though I am now retired and only have a small install of Xymon 4.3.30 at home for my home network. I have contributed to Xymon several times in the past when I had it installed in a large corporate environment before I retired.
J.C. and 4.4-alpha1 testers, I have done a little bit of testing of 4.4-alpha1 on Rocky Linux 8.8 (server and client) and on a busybox Linux install on a NAS. I looked into the gcc 8.5.0 compiler warnings that I got on Rocky Linux, and have corrected them, or silenced the ones that should not be an issue. Attached are two context diff patch files, one to fix the compiler warnings, and one to make a couple updates that I had applied to 4.3.30 previously. My updates fix the busybox Linux client build, and enhance the temperature graph to optionally display both Celsius and Fahrenheit readings.
I have not fully tested 4.4-alpha1 yet, but wanted to get these firstpatches released for 4.4-alpha2.
Tom Schmidt
On Wed, Sep 20, 2023 at 2:38?PM J.C. Cleaver <cleaver at terabithia.org> wrote:
Hello all! Just wanted to update everyone on a few things.
Going through the 4.x codebase re-familiarizing myself again with the state of everything, I recalled that I'd actually built a release artifact before development was paused, including a testing RPM that has actually been running unbeknownst on a VM for quite a while. Unfortunately, while validating that compiles from source worked I ran into what looked like showstopper bugs. These weren't showing up in the package, so I had to pore through a lot more code* than I expected to try to figure out where the package was accidentally fixing it.
(*message-sending code, which changes a lot in 4.4 to support compression, TLS, HTTP, and size-prefixed messages)
Fortunately, it ended up being a relatively simple issue (isn't it always?), with easy-enough validation and workaround (given below). Although more fixes could be put in (and I'm sure will be needed!), I believe there's some benefit to having a stable starting point using a build artifact from 2019.
As a result, I'm pleased to announce the first alpha for Xymon 4.4! As this is an alpha release, this is absolutely NOT suitable for production use and is intended mainly for smoketesting by source users. (And I expect there will be smoke.) The release tarball is available now at:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.4-alpha/xymon-4.4-alpha...
Major improvements are too many to list here but are noted in the Changes and RELEASENOTES files. README documents for compression, TLS, and IPv6 are in progress.
Some of the changes and improvements other than TLS support have been in the Terabithia packages (to some extent) for a while, so there will be less of a delta for those users to this alpha.
For the moment, I'd like to focus on source tarball users and others running xymon from scratch to help fix underlying issues and any smoketest failures, which I expect may crop up particularly on untested non-Linux platforms. Once the lower-hanging fruit is fixed and more patches are upstreamed and cleaned up, I'll release an alpha2 release at which point packages may be released to help with testing iteration and downstream distributors.
Please flag bug reports or patches as related to "alpha1" in the subject line to help keep things clear.
Thank you to everyone in the community for remaining part of it -- and xymon users! -- during this interregnum. Restarting development has been a process, but I'm glad to take this important first step to our next release.
Regards, -jc
*** KNOWN ISSUES -- IMPORTANT ***
The configure script is likely setting XYMONHOME/XYMONCLIENTHOME and XYMSRV/XYMSERVERS/XYMONSERVERS incorrectly, which will prevent xymonlaunch from correctly launching anything. Double check the xymon environment files (xymonserver/xymonclient.cfg) before starting either the server or client.
The tools/xymon-client.default and tools/xymonlaunch files may be placed into /etc/{sysconfig,default}/{xymon-client,xymonlaunch} to more easily set $XYMONSERVERS
Revealed by the above issue is a bug causing a crash in the client (or anywhere) when given an empty string as the destination argument (instead of 0, 127.0.0.1 or no variable set). Don't do this --> [ xymon '' "ping" ]
The client and logfetch binary may be being re-compiled during 'make install'
Compilation may fail if c-ares and at least one compression library is not present (lzo/lz4/zlib are all options). xxHash libraries are also highly recommended as the plan is for xxhash to replace md5 for checksumming functionality. libtirpc may be necessary on some platforms, and it's possible the build code is still expecting traditional (Sun) RPC
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