Hobbit 4.0 RC6 now available

[Henrik Stoerner]

Hobbit 4.0 RC6 is now available on 
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/hobbitmon/

This includes pre-built Debian packages for Debian/Sarge (i386 and
SPARC platforms), as well as an RPM-package (built on Mandrake, but it
will probably work on most recent RPM-based systems). These should be
considered "experimental", although I am currently running the Debian
packages on a full pre-production system at work, and the RPM package
at home. Please let me know if you have any problems with these.

As I mentioned in my 4.0 release status mail, this release-candidate
is the final wrap-up before the official release. It includes a small
number of important bugfixes, and a large number of portability and
packaging improvements. Full changelog below.

Yell if I broke something :-)


Regards,
Henrik


Changes from RC-5
-----------------
Bugfixes:
* Recovery messages were sent to all recipients, regardless
  of any color-restrictions on the alerts they received. Changed
  this so that recipients only get recovery messages for the
  alerts they received.

* The "NOALERT" option was not applied when multiple recipients
  were listed in one rule.

* bbtest-net now performs a syntax check on all URL's before
  adding them to the test queue. This should stop it from 
  crashing in case you happen to enter a syntactically invalid
  URL in your bb-hosts file.

* The acknowledgment log on the BB2 page could mix up data from
  different entries in the log.

* The default mail-utility used to send out e-mail alerts is
  now defined per OS. Solaris and HP-UX use "mailx", others
  use "mail".

* Client tests no longer go purple when a host has been 
  disabled.

* bb-larrdcolumn no longer dumps core if there are no RRD files.

* With the right input, bb-larrdcolumn could use massive amounts of
  memory and eventually terminate with an out-of-memory error.

* A memory leak in hobbitd_larrd handling of "disk" reports was fixed.

* bb-infocolumn now accepts a "--repeat=N" setting to inform it of
  the default alert-repeat interval. If you use --repeat with 
  hobbitd_alert, you should copy that option to bb-infocolumn to 
  make it generate correct info-column pages.

* If bbgen cannot create output files or directories, the underlying
  error is now reported in the error message.

* The "merge-lines" and "merge-sects" tools used during installation
  could crash due to a missing initialization of a pointer.


Improvements:
* It is now possible to make Hobbit re-open all logfiles,
  e.g. after a log rotate. Use "server/hobbit.sh rotate".

* The hobbit-mailack tool now recognizes the BB format of 
  alert message responses, i.e. putting "delay" and "msg"
  in the subject line will work.

* bbcmd defaults to running /bin/sh if no command is given

* hobbitd_larrd now logs the sender IP of a message that
  results in an error.

* A network test definition for SpamAssassin's spamd daemon
  was added.

* The default web/*header files now refer to a HOBBITLOGO setting
  for the HTML used in the upper-left corner of all pages. The 
  default is just the text "Hobbit", but you can easily replace
  this with e.g. a company logo by changing this setting in
  hobbitserver.cfg.

* The Hobbit daemon's "hobbitdboard", "hobbitdxboard" and 
  "hobbitdlist" commands now support a set of primitive filtering
  techniques to limit the number of hosts returned.

* maint.pl uses the new Hobbit daemon filtering and a cookie defined
  by the header in webpages to show only the hosts found on the
  page where it was called from, or just a single host.

* Hobbit should now compile on Mac OS X (Darwin).

* The info- and graph-column names are now defined globally as
  environment variables "INFOCOLUMN" and "LARRDCOLUMN", respectively.
  This eliminates the need to have them listed as options for multiple
  commands. Consequently, the --larrd and --info options have been 
  dropped.

* Systems with the necessary libraries (RRDtool, PCRE, OpenSSL etc) in
  unusual locations can now specify the location of these as parameters
  to the configure script, overriding the auto-detect routine. See
  "./configure --help" for details.

* A definition for the "disk1" graph in LARRD was added, this shows the
  actual use of filesystems instead of the normal percentage.