Big Sister - RELEASE NOTES-0.98b5

- Big Sister 0.98 beta 4 Release Notes

## Big Sister 0.98 beta 4 Release Notes

    In 0.98b4 we concentrated mainly on getting rid of a few
    nasty quirks and bugs. 0.98b4 should be smoother in setup
    and operation.

      RedHat 9 / Apache 2.0.  A tiny but annoying incompatibility
    of the CGIs with Apache 2.0 has been fixed, Big Sister outputs
    a warning when running under certain Perl versions with UTF-8
    support configured.

      The new style sensor concept is now stable. Please use
    new style sensors in uxmon-net (see NEWAGENT) wherever this
    is appropriate. The old-style tests will be deprecated one
    by one within the next few releases.

      New monitors.  In order to prove that the new style sensoring
    stuff is of any use a few more monitors have been added, such
    as the networking monitor for Linux, the vmstat monitor that
    does CPU load reporting on systems without a SystemV sar.
    Remember that you can get an up-to-date list of available
    new-style sensors using the "testers" command.

      Image map creation has undergone some bug hunting. It's
    much more robust, now and configuration mistakes do not
    lead to bsmon shutdowns any more.

      Image map.  The "at" and "line" statements now also accept
    host.check or group.check addressing. So you can display individual
    checks on image maps, too.

      Graphing.  Virtually all of the new-style sensors support
    graphing. Therefore we get some really nice performance graphs
    now. The graph index pages now let you select multiple graphs
    to show up on the same page allowing us to easily compare
    various system performance variables visually.

      Inverse tests.  New-style tests can be negated/inversed.
    For instance you can ensure that a host is not responding to
    SMTP requests via "myserver service=smtp !tcp" in uxmon-net.

      Network test speed override. Some systems (including namely
    Linux) do not provide correct interface speeds. You can now
    manually set interface speed for the "network" test, e.g.
    "myserver interface=eth0 speed=100Mb/s network".

      Test/host removing.  Yet another step in the history of
    purple/host removing - the "bsadmin remove" and "bsadmin leave"
    commands should now work correctly under all circumstances.

      bb_event_generator.cfg.  Fixed a few bugs in pattern matching
    code, should now work correctly with mixed case host names, too.

      Graphing.  Adding/removing services or devices (such as e.g.
    mounting a new partition) makes Big Sister re-order things
    internally. The grapher now re-associates re-ordered performance
    values correctly so that the risk of Big Sister e.g. reporting
    free space of partition A with legend "Partition B" has gone.

      RPM.  Got bsadmin back into the RPMs

      bsadmin.  Accepts "enable"/"disable" commands for setting
    hosts into maintenance mode from command line.

      Name spaces.  For developers: Everything has been moved out
    of the main:: namespace so that BigSister modules do not conflict
    with 3rd party software use-ing them.