[hobbit] Hobbit 4.1.0 available - includes Unix client
Michael Nemeth
michael.nemeth at lmco.com
Mon Jul 25 14:40:33 CEST 2005
Will the new hobbit client work with the 4.0.4 server?
BTW
I HAVE successful compiled the server on my HP-UX system! Ive not
installed and tested yet because Ive some
custom stuff to worry about!
Henrik Stoerner wrote:
>Hobbit 4.1.0 is available now on http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/, and
>will be uploaded to Sourceforge in a few hours as I get the pre-
>compiled binary packages ready.
>
>This release fixes a number of bugs in the previous version (4.0.4),
>most notably some bugs that could allow an attacker to crash the
>Hobbit server by sending certain malformed messages to the Hobbit
>server. It is therefore recommended that you upgrade your Hobbit
>installation.
>
>This release also has some optimizations in the hobbitd and
>hobbitd_alert tools, that improve the performance of Hobbit in
>large installations.
>
>The big change causing the version number to go from 4.0 -> 4.1,
>however, is the addition of a brand new Hobbit client implementation.
>
>The Hobbit client is included with support for Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD,
>OpenBSD, Solaris, HP-UX (untested) and Darwin (untested). Support
>for other Unix-like operating systems will appear as soon as
>possible; support for Windows-based systems is not currently planned,
>but will most likely appear later this year.
>
>The Hobbit client reports data for the "cpu", "disk", "memory" and
>"procs" columns in Hobbit, as well as feeding the "netstat" and
>"vmstat" graphs. It does not currenly handle system log monitoring
>(the "msgs" status column). The Hobbit client is compatible with
>most extension scripts written for the Big Brother client.
>
>Unlike other client implementations, the Hobbit client has no
>client-side configuration. All disk thresholds, process checks etc.
>are configured on the Hobbit server; no configuration is needed on
>the systems running the Hobbit client. See the etc/hobbit-clients.cfg
>file on your Hobbit server for a description of how to configure
>the client software.
>
>The Hobbit client is automatically installed and activated when
>a Hobbit server is installed. Client-only installations are described
>in the README.CLIENT file included with Hobbit 4.1.
>
>
>Regards,
>Henrik
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Changes from 4.0.4 -> 4.1.0
>---------------------------
>
>A Hobbit client for Unix systems has been implemented,
>and this was found important enough to warrant bumping
>the version number to 4.1.
>
>The README.CLIENT file has the details on how to use it.
>The client is automatically installed as part of a
>server installation.
>
>Server bugfixes:
>* [SECURITY] The Hobbit daemon (hobbitd) could crash when
> processing certain types of messages. It is believed that
> this could only be used for a denial-of-service attack
> against Hobbit, although it cannot completely be ruled
> out that an attacker might be able to exploit it to run
> arbitrary code with the privileges of the hobbit user.
> Thanks to Vernon Everett and Stefan Loos for their efforts
> in helping me track down these bugs.
>* Workaround a bug in KHTML based browsers (KDE's Konqueror,
> Mac OS X Safari) when generating reports: They cannot handle
> "multipart/mixed" documents, but only offer to save the
> document instead of sending you off to the report URL.
>* Fix a build problem on OpenBSD: Apparently OpenBSD's linker
> does not recognize the --rpath option.
>* A memory leak in the Hobbit daemon has been fixed (it would
> leak memory upon each reload of the bb-hosts file, which is
> done every 5 minutes).
>* Status messages using "&green" or another color in the first
> line of the status message would display the "&green" text
> instead of the color GIF image.
>* bbtest-net's collection of DNS responses has been delayed until
> an actual test is queued. Previously, a host with a "testip"
> flag could end up with a DNS lookup which doesn't really
> make sense.
>* Handling of the "notrends" tag was broken.
>* The duration string should no longer be included in the
> webpage showing a disabled test. (Only applies to tests
> disabled after installing Hobbit 4.0.5).
>* bbtest-net now reports "Hobbit" in the User-Agent header
> of all web requests, instead of "BigBrother".
>* If an alert was configured to be sent only during certain
> periods of time, the recovery message would be suppressed if
> the recovery happened outside of the alerting period. Changed
> so that recovery messages ignore the time-based restrictions.
>* hobbit-mailack would generate ack's valid for 30 minutes, instead
> of the documented 60 minutes. Changed to use 60 minutes.
>* An off-by-one error in the routine generating the HTML document
> headers and footers was caught by Valgrind.
>* A number of minor documentation fixes.
>* Memory reports from Win32 clients using the Big Brother client
> could trigger an overflow when calculating the memory usage,
> resulting in memory utilization being reported as 0. Changed
> to use a larger internal representation for the memory sizes.
>
>Server improvements:
>* A new reporting tool, hobbit-confreport.cgi, provides a
> way of generating a printable report summarizing the Hobbit
> monitoring configuration for a single server or a group of
> servers.
>* If a "custom" directory exists, you can have custom Hobbit
> tools located there and have them built during the normal
> build proces.
>* A status handed off to the hobbitd_alert module, but for which
> there is no alert recipient configured, would be re-checked
> every minute causing a heavy spike in the CPU load if there
> were many such statuses. A small code change allows us to
> skip these until the configuration file changes.
>* The code handling lookups of data from the bb-hosts file was
> changed to access the data via a tree-based search instead of
> a linear search. On large systems this provides a much more
> efficient retrieval of these data, reducing the overall load
> of Hobbit.
>* The internal representation of status-data inside the hobbitd
> daemon now uses a more efficient tree-structure instead of a
> simple linked list.
>* The NETFAILTEXT environment variable can be used to change
> the "not OK" text added to status messages of failed network
> tests.
>* External commands used in network testing (ntpdate, rpcinfo,
> traceroute) now have max. 30 seconds to complete. This is to
> avoid a broken ntpdate or similar to lock up the network tests.
> The "--cmdtimeout=N" option controls the length of the timeout.
>* hobbitlaunch no longer logs every task started to the
> hobbitlaunch.log file - this could result in the log file growing
> to huge proportions. The "--verbose" option for hobbitlaunch
> will restore the old behaviour, if needed.
>* A number of arbitrary limits on the size of various buffers,
> messages, queries and responses have been removed. Hobbit will
> now handle status-messages of practically any size, except
> that the interface between the main daemon and the worker modules
> (handling history, RRD files and alerts) is limited to 100 KB
> message size. Configuration files (bb-hosts, hobbit-alerts.cfg,
> hobbitserver.cfg, hobbitlaunch.cfg) can have lines of any length.
> Continuation lines are now supported in all configuration files.
>* The moverrd.sh is now included in the default installation.
>* OpenBSD vmstat output now supported.
>
>
>LARRD / Hobbit cleanup:
>Upon request from Craig Cook, the code and docs were changed to
>clarify that Hobbit and LARRD are not related. I therefore
>decided to remove references to "LARRD" in the configuration files,
>resulting in these changes:
>
>* LARRDCOLUMN renamed to TRENDSCOLUMN, and LARRDS renamed to TEST2RRD
> in hobbitserver.cfg (handled automatically by "make install").
>* The bb-hosts "LARRD:" tag was renamed to "TRENDS:". Existing bb-hosts
> files using the old tag still work, though.
>* The hobbitd_larrd program were renamed to hobbitd_rrd. The default
> hobbitlaunch.cfg file was also changed to reflect this, and the
> names of the logfiles from the two RRD update tasks were changed as
> well. All of this should happen automatically when running "make
> install", but if you have added extra options - e.g. for custom graphs -
> then you may need to re-do those modifications in hobbitlaunch.cfg.
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>To unsubscribe from the hobbit list, send an e-mail to
>hobbit-unsubscribe at hswn.dk
>
>
--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
| _p_ Mike Nemeth
| ___| |_____ email(w) michael.nemeth at lmco.com Work: 856 359-1425
|><___________) | Home Page:http://www.geocities.com/mjnemeth/
| Work Page:http://faraday.motown.lmco.com:3000/~nemethm/
| Work Page:http://ortsweb/~mnemeth/
|++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.xymon.com/pipermail/xymon/attachments/20050725/b89deedc/attachment.html>
More information about the Xymon
mailing list