Hobbit 4.2 release candidate available

[Henrik Stoerner]

It's taken some time, but after a month of bug reports, debugging and
last-minute enhancements there is now a release candidate of Hobbit 4.2
available on SourceForge.

You can download it from SourceForge.net by following this link:
https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=128058&release_id=431566
or browse Release Notes and ChangeLog by visiting this link:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=431566

As far as I know, all bugs that were reported for the beta release
have been resolved, with the exception of the hobbitping "flapping"
for some hosts. This is still being investigated, but until that
gets resolved I'd suggest that you use fping instead.

Information about problems and fixes for the release candidate will
appear on the RC release info page at http://www.hswn.dk/hobbitsw/betapatches/

Apart from the bug-fixes, some enhancements and new tools were added
during the betatest:

* Two new tools implement a "pull-style" collection of data from
  Hobbit clients - i.e. the Hobbit server contacts the clients, and
  pulls their data - as a supplement to the normal push-style
  data collection used by clients. This is typically used for 
  hosts located in a DMZ network zone, which cannot make outbound
  connections to the Hobbit server. See the hobbitfetch(8) and
  msgcache(8) man-pages.
* A new utility hobbit-hostgraphs.cgi(1) was added, allowing you
  to build graphs with data from multiple hosts.
* The "Acknowledge Alert" utility has been enhanced, so you can 
  acknowledge an alert without having to use the ack-code from an
  alert e-mail. This requires that you setup the bb-ack CGI to allow
  this, by adding the --no-pin option to CGI_ACK_OPTS in hobbitcgi.cfg.
* The "Find host" utility was enhanced so that if all hosts found
  appear on the same page, it sends you directly to that page.
* A new "Ghost clients" report was added, giving you quick access
  to the list of current ghost clients.
* Alert scripts now receive a series of environment variables with
  the bb-hosts configuration items for the host.
* For web tests, it is now possible for Hobbit to pretend being a
  specific browser, through a BROWSER tag in bb-hosts.
* Workarounds for compile-time problems on HP-UX, and LDAP runtime
  library problems were added.
* File checks can now be optional, i.e. they will only be performed
  if the file in question exists.

So ... go wild. Test it. Report bugs. And don't forget to enjoy
the summer.


Regards,
Henrik