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  Remstats was written by
  Thomas Erskine at the
  CRC in Canada and now
  at SourceWorks.

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Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0a3

It's always a good idea to run check-config after changing any of the config-files, but it's also a good idea to run it after doing an upgrade, especially when, as in this version, there are changes to the config-files.

Mostly small new features and bug-fixes, except:

  • Incompatible: re-written alert-sending mechanism. Permits easily written new methods of sending alerts, by separating the alert-text generation (see alerter) from the alert-sending (see alert-email and alert-winpopup). The new alert-destination-map config-file permits mapping an alert-destination to different addresses depending on the time-of-day, day-of-week, ... and its alias facility permits sending to a list of addresses which may use different methods of sending the alert.
  • Incompatible: The unix-status-server's do_df now returns bytes not K-bytes. This avoids silliness in the graphs saying that you've got 20k kbytes free. It may have been correct, but it wasn't intuitive. You can multiply all the old numbers by 1000 to convert RRDs.
  • Warning: new-config now copies the configuration files which you are likely to change, so that your changes won't be overwritten by an update to remstats. Unfortunately, as all updates (including this one) will overwrite config-base, so people upgrading from a previous version of remstats should convert the following files from symlinks to config-base into copies of those files:
    • alerts alert-destination-map general html links tools

    You can do this by running the supplied convert-config-links script BEFORE INSTALLING THIS VERSION

New Features

  • the new datapage-status script generates datapages for each host, which will show the current values of all rrd variables. There is a new tool in the default tools config-file which will show this page, and it's been added to the defaults generated by the new-xxx-hosts programs.
  • Host templates. So that you can configure similar hosts like:
    	desc	whatever
    	template their-template

    Can also be used to make changing some things for many hosts easier. E.G., you could have a template, say default-nt-status-server which contained:

    	nt-status-server some-host

    and configure all hosts which use c<some-host> like:

    	template default-nt-status-server
  • New availability-report and availability-report.cgi and config-file availability for reporting on "availability".
  • New nt-status-server and nt-status-collector and RRDs for them (ntactivity, ntmemory, ntpaging, ntnetwork and ntlogicaldisk-*).
  • New cleanup program to remove stale files.
  • New new-snmp-hosts now adds other rrds than snmpif-*
  • New new-unix-hosts program to add hosts which are running the unix-status-server with the apropriate rrds.
  • ought to work with perl 5.6 now. I'm not using perl 5.6 on the main collector yet, but it seems to install correctly on a test system.
  • run-remstats now checks all configuration sub-directories to figure out if anything has changed, so you ought to be able to just edit files and the changes will get caught on the next run.
  • remstats internal instrumentation allows monitoring remstats collectors, for now. More later. Look at the pseudo-host _remstats_.
  • removed old Overall Index, since I never looked at it, and wrote a new RRD Index, which I was always wanting.
  • new nt-discover program to discover and add NT systems

    Note: this adds the new discovery config-file which must be locally configured. I won't even attempt to guess at values here.

  • The old alertflag entry in the html config-file has been replaced by three new entries: alertflagcritical, alertflagerror and alertflagwarn, allowing e.g. different colors for the different levels of alert.
  • datapage.cgi now does variable substitution properly for HTML macros. See the example datapage upss.page under /etc/remstats/config/datapages.
  • datapage.cgi and dataimage.cgi have two new commands: alertstatus and alertvalue to fetch alert statuses and values. To be used on forthcoming status pages.

Release Notes for Remstats version 0.13.1

I fixed a minor buglet in 0.13.0 which was noticed shortly after release. I was annoyed enough with it that I made 0.13.1.

Release Notes for Remstats version 0.13.0 (AKA 0.12.2)

There are lots of little improvements, which are detailed in the Change History, which I'm not going into here. The main incompatible changes are:

  • The configuration structure ($main::config) now has the graphs stored under $main::config{RRD}{$wildrrd}{GRAPH} instead of $main::config{GRAPH}, so there won't be problems with having the same graph-name defined under two different rrds. This will only affect you if you've been writing your own code for remstats, like a new page-maker. I thought that the bug was annoying enough and difficult to figure out when it was triggered that the incompatibility was worth the change.
  • After typing $main::config{CUSTOMGRAPH} instead of $main::config{CUSTOM} one too many times, I renamed $main::config{CUSTOM} to $main::config{CUSTOMGRAPH} which is what it should have been all along. Again, this should only affect you if you've been writing your own remstats code, like a new page-maker.
  • Changed default location for datapages to /etc/remstats/config/datapages, so that all the configuration, including the datapages are together.
  • Removed the general config-file directive pagesas since all the generated pages are CGIs now. Check-config will abort if you still have it. Just delete that line in the general config-file.
  • use strict in all the scripts (unless I missed some) in preparation for perl 5.6, which doesn't like use vars. Shouldn't bother you unless you've been writing remstats code, in which case, you probably know what to do.
  • To deal with alert templates (see below), you'll need to manually fix your config-dirs. For each one, you need to:
    	su remstats
    	cd your-config-dir
    	cp /var/lib/remstats/etc/config-base/alert-template-map .
    	mkdir alert-templates
    	cp /var/lib/remstats/etc/config-base/alert-templates/* alert-templates
  • remoteping-collector has been modified to return the server-name instead of a number to differentiate the data from different servers. There's also a new remoteping-* wildcard RRD to make it more usefull.

Customgraphs on host-index pages

The new customgraph graphname directive for host config-files permits you to add a customgraph to a host-index page. (Thanks Marek.)

graph.cgi - remstats graphs anywhere

Like it says, using the new graph.cgi, you can put remstats graphs on any page you want.

Views

You can now define your own pages with page-layout of your choice using views. (Thanks to Marek and Thorsten and Matt and anyone else I've forgotten.) Don't forget to add view-writer to the list of pagemakers if you've changed the default.

ping-* rrd

You can now ping different interfaces on a host separately (Thanks Steve)

fileage section for unix-status-server

This allows you to fetch the last-modification-time for specified files. It was written to allow remstats to monitor lock-files to check for stale locks. There is no included rrd using it as lock-files are all over the place.

port-collector can collect data from results

The port-collector has always been able to send a string to remote services to that it could tell if they were working correctly. Now it can pull values for RRDs and status-files from the results as well. I've included a sample rrd (weathernetwork) and script (weathernetwork) to collect current weather data for Ottawa. Look at the updated docs for scripts config-files.

new script - snmpif-description-updater

The snmpif-description-updater will keep the descriptions on snmpif-* RRDs up-to-date with whatever you've set as ifAlias for that interface. (Thanks Steve Francis.)

Alert Templates

This feature allows you to customize the alert messages by addressee or by RRD. Look at the docs in alert-template-map and alert-templates.

Autoconf-like configure

You can now do:

	./configure
	make
	make install

for the beginning of of the install.


Release Notes for Remstats version 0.12.1

Ideally, this document will only have to tell you about the great new features of remstats in this version.

Not this time.

In addition, due to various stuff (read the Change History), this covers changes since version 0.11.1.

Configuration File Replaced by Configuration Directory

The old "one huge configuration file" has been replaced by a directory of files and sub-directories. (See the new configuration docs for details.) This means that most programs don't need to read and parse everything, including stuff that they're not going to use. It also makes it easier to find things, as you can go directly to the file that has what you want, e.g. details on a particular host. It also made possible the newly revamped replacements for make-ping-hosts, make-port-hosts and make-snmp-hosts, which will insert their additions directly into the appropriate configuration files.

There is a new script, split-config, which will take your old config-file and a new name and generate a new config-dir from it.

On a related note, I broke the groups line out of the general config-file into its own file. It's easier to see what you've got. split-config will do this for you. Also the (undocumented) [html] section will absorb large portions of the [general] section which really belong to wep-page generation.

If you've made your own collector, you'd better look at the new skeleton-collector for the required changes. Just change read_config to read_config_dir, with extra args. There's also documentation on how to write your own collector.

do-remstats replaced by run-remstats

The old do-remstats shell-script and all the kludgy shell-scripts that went with it and the watchdog and lockfile scripts have all gone away. The replacement run-remstats does everything they did and does it correctly. It's also configurable, so you don't need to modify the scripts to change which collectors you want to run, e.g.

A new feature of run-remstats configurability is that you can have it run the ping-collector before everything else and not bother trying hosts that didn't answer it. You can also choose which collectors, monitors and pagemakers to run.

CGI scripts and non-default config-dirs

At the moment, the supplied CGI scripts don't deal with non-default config-dirs. I do consider this to be a problem, but I need to get this release out to deal with other serious installation problems.

You can work-around this by editing the installed CGI scripts and putting in the correct definition for $config_dir, near the top.

plugin-collector is gone

It was an inefficient, difficult-to-configure, kludge and isn't needed anymore with the new run-remstats.

pre-release testing automated

You won't see it, but I hope you'll all notice the improvement in release quality.


Last updated Thu Mar 17 17:00:23 UTC 2005 by
<thomas.erskine@sourceworks.com>.
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