[hobbit] Xymon 4.3.0: Beta version available on Sourceforge

[Larry.Sherman at rbs.com]

Wonderful news Henrik!  I have 2 servers waiting for just this occasion.

Many, many thanks to you.

Larry

Larry Sherman
RBS Global Banking & Markets
Office: +1 203 618 2515


-----Original Message-----
From: henrik at hswn.dk [mailto:henrik at hswn.dk]
Sent: Monday, February 09, 2009 9:03 AM
To: hobbit at hswn.dk
Subject: [hobbit] Xymon 4.3.0: Beta version available on Sourceforge


So you didn't think I'd do two releases in one day, eh?

I've uploaded the first beta version of xymon 4.3.0 to
Sourceforge a few moments ago. If you have the time and
a spare system to test it with, I'd appreciate any effort
you can lend me in getting the bugs ironed out.

You should be aware that there IS a lot of new stuff in
this version, and I more or less expect it to crash
spectacularly in your setup. So putting it on mission-
critical systems could be seen as slightly dangerous.

If you have looked at the "trunk" of the sourcecode
repository, you will be familiar with the new stuff in
this version. However if you compare it to what's in
the current beta-release, you will notice that I have left
out some of the more "dangerous" new components from this
release. This was done to make testing a bit more manageable;
I have a lot of new code for Xymon, and throwing all of it
into one release would just wreak havoc on everyones
systems.

So instead I am preparing for a series of releases over the
coming months, where new features will be introduced in a
controlled fashion.

But the current release is not void of new stuff. Far from
it - here are the highlights of the 4.3.0 version:

Core changes:
* Hosts which appear on multiple pages in the web display can
  use any page they are on in the alerting rules and elsewhere.
* Support for defining holidays as non-working days in alerts and
  SLA calculations.
* Worker modules (RRD, client-data parsers etc) can operate on
  remote hosts from the hobbitd daemon, for load-sharing.
* New API's for loadhosts and sendmessage, in preparation for
  the full 5.0 changes.
* Always use getcurrenttime() instead of time().
* Various bugfixes collected over time.

Network test changes:
* Merged new network tests from trunk: SOAP-over-HTTP,
  SSL minimum cipher strength
* Changed network test code to always report a validity period
  for network tests, so it it possible to run network tests less
  often than every 30 minutes (e.g. once an hour).
* Make the content-type setting in HTTP POST tests configurable.
* Make the source-address used for TCP tests configurable.
* Make the acceptable HTTP result codes configurable.
* Use and save HTTP session cookies.

Web changes
* "NOCOLUMNS" changed to work for all columns.
* New "group-sorted" definition to auto-sort hosts in a group
* Use browser tooltips for host comments
* "Compact" status allows several statuses to appear as a single
  status on the overview webpages.
* Trends page can select the time period to show. Buttons provided
  for the common selections.
* Ghost list report now lists possible candidates for a ghost,
  based on IP-address or unqualified hostname.
* Support generic drop-down lists in templates.

Report changes
* Number of outages as SLA parameter

Miscellaneous
* hobbitlaunch support for running tasks only on certain hosts,
  and for a maximum time.
* Alert script get a unique ID for each alert.


The plan for the future is to let this release stabilize for a month
or so, depending on how many bugs show up. Then I'll introduce new
releases about once every two months - with the following schedule
(everything subject to change):

Version 4.4:
* SNMP support for data collection
* Status updates based on data collected in the RRD files (this is
  really nice - essentially, *any* value you put into an RRD file
  can trigger a new or modified status in Xymon. So you could eg.
  change the status of your "http" test to go red, if the response
  time of a webpage exceeds 5 seconds).
* Status "flap" handling, to catch statuses that change rapidly.

Version 4.5:
* Support for communication between clients and Xymon to use
  compression and/or encryption.
* Support for client authentication via SSL certificates (so
  you cannot spoof a client message).

Version 4.6:
* Revised web interface - eliminate the need for webserver-based
  authentication, and provide more fine-grained authorization
  for the various Xymon components.
* Per-user custom login pages, so the login will always show those
  systems that the user has responsibility for / is allowed to
  access.

Somewhere along the road I will also introduce a new "ping" test
daemon - I am getting to the point where ping'ing all hosts take
longer than 5 minutes (I have a lot of hosts). So something needs
to be done, and I think I know how to do it.


Have fun!

Henrik


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