[hobbit] Hobbit 4.1.0 available - includes Unix client

[David Gore]

You should update the README?

root at hobbit:/var/tmp/hobbit-4.1.0> ./configure
./configure: cannot shift

Or the configure script?

How to install
--------------
Detailed installation instructions are in the
docs/install.html file. Essentially, it boils down
to running
         ./configure
         make
         make install
but do have a look at the install.html file for more
detailed instructions.

This is on Solaris 9.

I will now start with:

root at hobbit:/var/tmp/hobbit-4.1.0> ./configure --server

Configuration script for Hobbit

This script asks a few questions and builds a Makefile to compile Hobbit



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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
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