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.

