bbwin 0.10 available

[Etienne Grignon]

Hello,

After more than a year without new release, I publish today BBWin
0.10. This is the new stuffs I put in it:

BBWin 0.10 Preview version -  December 30th 2007
-------------------

+New Features

** Centralized mode for agents cpu, disk, memory, msgs, netstat,
ports, procs, timediff, uptime
** Centralized mode graphing network traffic
** See the bbWin webpage for instructions http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/

* Msgs agent reports parts of description events when the message file
contening the
  static string can't be found. It will reports as the Windows Event
Viewer, just like this :
  "The description for Event ID ( XXX ) in Source ( XXX ) cannot be found.
  The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message
  DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use
  the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and
Support for details.
  The following information is part of the event: XXXXX, XXXXX."
* You can use environment variables in the bbwinupdate agent. Example :
  <setting name="filename" value="bbwin\%COMPUTERNAME%.cfg" />
* svcs services rules can be used with comments
* disk agent can monitor free space from XX-rom drive and not only if
a media is inserted.
             (feature requested to monitor dvd-ram burning state)
* disk agent can monitor volume mount points
* Proxy access : BBWin can access to your hobbit server through a
proxy (http proxy)
  You can specify a user/password if you use http proxy basic authentication.
* disk agent will alert you if a disk monitored with a custum rule
disappear from the Server.
  (Example : external usb harddrive turned off)
* uptime agent : add max delay option to get alerts when servers are
up for a too long time
* who agent : report current connected users on the servers

Here the link for the download :

http://sourceforge.net/projects/bbwin

About the centralized mode, to handle it with bbwin, you have to use a
patch for hobbit 4.2 or for the future 4.3, it is available on
http://bbwin.sourceforge.net/
The centralized mode for BBWin in hobbit sources has been developed by
François Lacroix, one of the new developper of devmon. Big thanks to
him. Even if we tested on our servers, it may contains bugs so you
should test it not on productions servers for the moment. You can
report bugs on the bbwin or hobbit mailing list so we can improve the
solution. We hope to have something enough good to be included in
hobbit 4.3 and will continue to update the patch for hobbit 4.2.
The client-local.cfg is not supported for the moment. It is the next
step (files, dir, logs, clientupdate).

I have also some general questions about bbwin  :

Actually, svcs only works as a local agent because there is no option
for it in hobbit-clients.cfg, it is very specific to Windows world.
What do you prefer ?

-	we keep svcs agent with local configuration. BBWin can handle
centralized mode with agents which will run with local configuration
-	we create a new option for the hobbit-clients.cfg which will be only
used for Windows client
-	May be you have other good ideas about that problem. At this time,
it is only about svcs agent but for advanced features in the future,
we will have other choices to make.

With the centralized mode, you will see that you get graphs for each
of your networks connections. However, for Windows, the names are too
long compared to the unix name (eth0, eri0..). So, at this time, I use
the mac address of the network card for the graph name. Would you
prefer to use the name by making a very short name ? the ip address ?
or is the mac address fine ?

There is a new agent 'who' used to report current connected users on
the windows servers. There is no alert for it at this time. Which
relevant type of alerts could be useful ? there is no alert options on
Unix side. I was thinking of a rule like PROC but called USER with a
minimum logged number and a maximum logged number for a username.

For 2008, I will do my best to create more releases. 2007 was not a
good year :-) The first goal will be to finalize the centralized mode
with all the unix options. I now use the sourceforge subversion
repository so you will always get the lastest sources of BBWin.

As usual, let me know if you get troubles with this new version.

Happy new year for all the hobbit community :-)


Etienne.