[Xymon] Update on 4.4 (Alpha1 release)

[nor krie]

These are excellent news, JC!

I'm about to discuss Xymon as the central monitoring solution with a new
customer, and the PoC was almost cancelled as the project seems to be dead
from their standpoint. In these days something looks insecure and outdated
very fast even if the framework is quite mature and stable and much more
flexible as a lot of other, feature overloaded solutions imho.
Especially the announcement of encrypted communication will help a lot for
the discussion with customer. I'm looking forward for the 4.4. beta and
will compile and implement it immediately at my test envs once it is
available.

I wonder if xymonton is still the only (and preferred) place to add custom
extension scripts and howtos? It also looks quite silent but I can add
several addons and some hints for customization for the GUI and so on,
based on my experience with dozens of implementations (up to 20k servers).

Keep the momentum and thx for the great work!

Norbert

Am Mi., 20. Sept. 2023 um 22:38 Uhr schrieb J.C. Cleaver <
cleaver at terabithia.org>:

> Hello all! Just wanted to update everyone on a few things.
>
> Going through the 4.x codebase re-familiarizing myself again with the
> state of everything, I recalled that I'd actually built a release artifact
> before development was paused, including a testing RPM that has actually
> been running unbeknownst on a VM for quite a while. Unfortunately, while
> validating that compiles from source worked I ran into what looked like
> showstopper bugs. These weren't showing up in the package, so I had to
> pore through a lot more code* than I expected to try to figure out where
> the package was accidentally fixing it.
>
> (*message-sending code, which changes a lot in 4.4 to support compression,
> TLS, HTTP, and size-prefixed messages)
>
> Fortunately, it ended up being a relatively simple issue (isn't it
> always?), with easy-enough validation and workaround (given below).
> Although more fixes could be put in (and I'm sure will be needed!), I
> believe there's some benefit to having a stable starting point using a
> build artifact from 2019.
>
> As a result, I'm pleased to announce the first alpha for Xymon 4.4! As
> this is an alpha release, this is absolutely NOT suitable for production
> use and is intended mainly for smoketesting by source users. (And I expect
> there will be smoke.) The release tarball is available now at:
>
>
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/xymon/files/Xymon/4.4-alpha/xymon-4.4-alpha1.tar.gz
>
>
> Major improvements are too many to list here but are noted in the Changes
> and RELEASENOTES files. README documents for compression, TLS, and IPv6
> are in progress.
>
> Some of the changes and improvements other than TLS support have been in
> the Terabithia packages (to some extent) for a while, so there will be
> less of a delta for those users to this alpha.
>
> For the moment, I'd like to focus on source tarball users and others
> running xymon from scratch to help fix underlying issues and any smoketest
> failures, which I expect may crop up particularly on untested non-Linux
> platforms. Once the lower-hanging fruit is fixed and more patches are
> upstreamed and cleaned up, I'll release an alpha2 release at which point
> packages may be released to help with testing iteration and downstream
> distributors.
>
> Please flag bug reports or patches as related to "alpha1" in the subject
> line to help keep things clear.
>
>
> Thank you to everyone in the community for remaining part of it -- and
> xymon users! -- during this interregnum. Restarting development has been a
> process, but I'm glad to take this important first step to our next
> release.
>
>
> Regards,
> -jc
>
>
>
> *** KNOWN ISSUES -- IMPORTANT ***
>
> The configure script is likely setting XYMONHOME/XYMONCLIENTHOME and
> XYMSRV/XYMSERVERS/XYMONSERVERS incorrectly, which will prevent xymonlaunch
> from correctly launching anything. Double check the xymon environment
> files (xymonserver/xymonclient.cfg) before starting either the server or
> client.
>
> The tools/xymon-client.default and tools/xymonlaunch files may be placed
> into /etc/{sysconfig,default}/{xymon-client,xymonlaunch} to more easily
> set $XYMONSERVERS
>
> Revealed by the above issue is a bug causing a crash in the client (or
> anywhere) when given an empty string as the destination argument (instead
> of 0, 127.0.0.1 or no variable set). Don't do this --> [ xymon '' "ping" ]
>
> The client and logfetch binary may be being re-compiled during 'make
> install'
>
> Compilation may fail if c-ares and at least one compression library is not
> present (lzo/lz4/zlib are all options). xxHash libraries are also highly
> recommended as the plan is for xxhash to replace md5 for checksumming
> functionality. libtirpc may be necessary on some platforms, and it's
> possible the build code is still expecting traditional (Sun) RPC
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Xymon at xymon.com
> http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
>
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