Hobbit 4.0 RC4 available

[Henrik Stoerner]

OK, so RC3 was slightly disastrous, and lots of patches have been
flying around this past week. So to get everyone aligned on the same
code-base, I've packaged up release candidate #4 which you'll find in
the usual places: http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon/ and
http://www.hswn.dk/beta/

This of course fixes the bugs that caused RC3 to crash left and right.

I also have gone over the alert code again, and now believe that it
has reached a state of Nirvana where it is "obviously correct". In
other words, alerts should go out as intended; if they don't then
add the "--trace=FILENAME" option to hobbitd_alert and let me have the
logfile after you've re-created the problem.

The flickering purples for disabled tests should be a thing of the
past.

Several problems with building on various platforms were resolved.
As part of this change, you must re-run the configure script to have
it pickup a couple of new settings that have been added.


Along the way, I found out that I'd made a slight error of judgment in
choosing the format of the hobbitlaunch.cfg file. So that has changed!
If you have modified your hobbitlaunch.cfg - especially if you have
deleted or commented out sections - I strongly advise you to copy the
new file over from hobbit-4.0-RC4/etcfiles/, or at least look over the
differences between that file and your current configuration. "make
install" will not overwrite the file, but it might re-add sections
that you have removed; instead of removing them or commenting them
out, add the keyword "DISABLED" to make them permanenly disabled.

Also, the hobbitserver.cfg file didn't quote the commands added for BB
client scripts, resulting in errors being logged by some of the
reporting CGI scripts. So copy over the new hobbitserver.cfg file that
is generated in hobbitd/etcfiles/ when you build hobbit.


Full list of changes below.


Regards,
Henrik



Changes from RC-3 -> RC-4
-------------------------

Bugfixes:
* Loading the bb-services file no longer causes bbtest-net,
  hobbitd_larrd et al to crash.
* The alert configuration loader was fixed, so that
  recipient criteria are applied correctly.
* hobbitd_alert handling of "recovered" status messages was
  slightly broken. This was probably the cause of the
  unexpected "green" alerts that some have reported.
* SCRIPT recipients can now have a "@" in their names without
  being silently treated as MAIL recipients.
* An acknowledge message is now cleared when the status changes
  to an OK color (defined by the --okcolors option). Previously
  it would have to go "green" before the ack was cleared.
* Acked and disabled statuses can not go purple while the
  acknowledge or disable is valid. This was causing brief flickers
  of purple for tests that were disabled for more than 30 minutes.
* maint.pl "combo" message support was dropped. This was causing
  runtime warnings, and it has never been possible to send enable
  or disable messages inside combo's (neither with Hobbit nor BB).


Building Hobbit:
* bb-infocolumn should build without problems again.

* The "configure" script now also looks in /opt/csw for
  tools and libraries (for Solaris/x86)

* An OpenBSD Makefile was contributed.

* The gcc option "-Wl,--rpath" is now used when linking
  the tools on Linux and *BSD. This should resolve a lot of
  the issues with runtime libraries that cannot be found.

* "configure" now looks for your perl utility, and adjusts
  the maint.pl script accordingly.

* HP-UX does not have an atoll() routine. So a simple 
  implementation of this routine was added.


Configuration file changes:
* hobbitlaunch.cfg now supports a DISABLED keyword to shut
  off unwanted tasks. This permits upgrading without having
  to re-disable stuff.
* All commands in hobbitserver.cfg are now quoted, so it
  can be sourced by the CGI scripts without causing errors.
  Note that this is NOT automatically changed in an existing
  configuration file.


Improvements:
* The detailed status display now lets you define what graphs
  should be split onto multiple graph images (the "--multigraphs"
  option for bb-hostsvc.cgi and hobbitd_filestore). Currently
  the "disk", "inode" and "qtree" graphs are handled this way.
* The detailed status display now includes a line showing how
  long an acknowledgment is valid. This is configurable via the
  ACKUNTILMSG setting in hobbitserver.cfg.
* A new "notify" message is supported as part of the Hobbit 
  protocol. This takes a normal hostname+testname paramater,
  plus a text message; this is sent out as an informational
  message using the hobbit-alerts.cfg rules to determine recipients.
  This replaces the BB "notify-admin" recipient with a more
  fine-grained and configurable system. Currently used by
  maint.pl when enabling and disabling tests.
* Alert scripts now receive a CFID environment variable with the
  linenumber of the hobbit-alerts.cfg file that caused this
  alert to go out.
* A new tool - hobbit-mailack - was added. If setup to run from
  e.g. the Hobbit users' .procmailrc file, you can acknowledge
  alerts by responding to an alert email.
* Temperature reports now accept additional text in parenthesis
  without being confused.


-- 
Henrik Storner