So - the beta release of Hobbit 4.2 is out there, available on http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon/ The source tar.gz file is there, and there are pre-built Debian packages for i386 and Sparc. RPM's will appear shortly.

I have just about cleared the list of bugs reported on the mailing list, so anything you notice that doesn't seem right - do report it so we can get a final version without too many glitches.

Compared to the alfa-version released about one month ago, this version includes much better documentation - especially about the new Critical systems view and editor, but also some Release notes that explain what you will have to do in order to configure your existing system to use all of the new stuff.

Other notable changes:

• The Hobbit client now reports the local system time, and a new CLOCK setting in hobbit-clients.cfg lets you check that it isn't too far off from the real time (i.e. the time on the Hobbit server).
• The clients can now do a simple count of lines in a logfile that match a given expression, and create a graph of the linecount. Useful to catch e.g. disk errors being logged at an increasing rate, or firewall log messages indicating a sudden increase in probes from the Internet.
• An IRIX client implementation has been added. It doesn't have the vmstat graphs yet - some work is needed to get those from "sar", since IRIX systems do not have a vmstat command.
• The Unix clients can automatically update themselves. See the clientupdate(1) man-page. Hopefully this means that you'll never have to re-install the Hobbit client on your systems again.
• Ping tests now use "hobbitping" instead of fping.
• The client now supports large files (> 2GB).

The plan for now is to have just this one beta-release. Depending on how many bugs are reported, I might arrange for a single Release-candidate version, or I may choose to just do the full release right away. It all depends on how well this release works. So do give it a try.

Regards, Henrik