    TITLE=Release Notes DESCRIPTION=special things to look out for in this
    release KEYWORDS=release,notes,warnings DOCTOP=index
    DOCPREV=architecture DOCNEXT=bugs SECTION=Release Notes

Release Notes
    Note: These release notes do not cover the usual install, just
    differences from previous version, new features and special procedures
    involved in upgrading from one version to another. In other words, this
    isn't a short-cut, it's more stuff you've got to read. Sorry.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.13a
  Bug Fixes
  Significant changes
    Dropped graph-writer from distribution. If you've already moved to using
    run_remstats2, you'll already be using page-writer instead. If not,
    switch now.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.12b
  Bug Fixes
    - Problem with time-sync for remstats servers fixed, see item 198 in
    done. Unless all your hosts running remstats servers are time
    synchronized, you need this release. I guess that's why I never ran into
    this before. :-)

  Changes
    - If you're upgrading, you should switch from run-remstats to
    run-remstats2. The former will be going away soon and the latter is much
    more flexible.
    - moved the default location of the datapage directory. If you don't
    change yours, then all the pagemakers will run every time, which is bad.
    Edit your "general" config-file and change "datapagedir" to something
    outside /home/remstats/etc/config. The new default is
    "/home/remstats/data/DATAPAGES", which you should probably use unless
    you have reasons to do otherwise. Then move
    /home/remstats/etc/config/datapages to /home/remstats/data/DATAPAGES, or
    wherever you decided to put it.
    - replaced the remoteping rrd with remoteping-*, allowing one RRD per
    remoteping-server host.
    - renamed "cleanup" to remstats-cleanup to avoid name collisions. Make
    sure that you change the remstats user's crontab.

  New Features
    - new docs section on troubleshooting. Check it out and suggest
    additions.
    - check-rrdlast will show the last-update times for all RRDs and
    optionally the data for that last update.
    - new error-collector to count errors/aborts in the other collectors and
    thus allow alerts based on this.
    - new alert-syslog alert-sender to log alerts to syslog

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.11b
    all configuration files/directories will be checked to see if the
    configuration has changed, to determine if run-remstats needs to run the
    pagemakers.
    New rt-updater program to watch info on a specified host+RRD+graph in
    near real-time. It's not well integrated with everything else, but it's
    still usefull for testing.
    New program-collector to run external programs to supply values for
    RRDs, written by Arnauld Michelizza.
    All the collectors now honor a stop file. If there is a file in the
    configuration-specified tempdir called "STOP-programname", then the
    collector called "programname" will exit after reading its
    configuration. This is more for debugging, but there may be other
    reasons to use it. This is similar to the feature in run-remstats and
    run-remstats2.
    New show-config.cgi to allow configuration browsing. No editing. Also,
    it's incomplete, but it does do the important pieces: hosts, and rrds
    and what they refer to. However, it's not secure, in that it may reveal
    too much, such as SNMP community strings. Make very sure that you
    control access to it.
    "Make install" now will make default htpasswd and htgroup files for use
    with apache's htpasswd feature, if it can find an "htpasswd" program in
    the path. These will also be used by the new access_control routine
    which will be used to control access to all the cgis.
    "configure" will now do proper checking for required and optional perl
    modules. Missing required modules will abort "configure"; missing
    optional modules will mark the files which require them so that they
    won't be syntax checked (which would fail).

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.10b
    If you see this version, you're really fast. Please remove it and take
    1.0.11b instead.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.9b
    Note: There is a new target in the Makefile: "upgrade". It's supposed to
    do the required changes for folks who are upgrading from previous
    versions. It won't work for upgrading from versions before 1.0.4a. It
    has NOT been exhaustively tested, especially for earlier versions. If
    the install target notices that the configuration directory exists, it
    will try to do the upgrade for you. To use it manually:

    BACKUP YOUR CURRENT CONFIGURATION!

            make all
            make upgrade
            make install
            ...

  New Features
    The new run-remstats2 program replaces run-remstats. It also brings two
    more config-files run and run-stages. This permits "run-remstats2" to be
    completely configurable in what programs get run. This can be used to
    run more processes in parallel, but intelligently divided, to permit the
    run to complete more quickly.
        [UPGRADE] If you are upgrading, this will require you to do the
        following, before doing the install:

                mkdir /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run-stages
                ln -s /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run /home/remstats/etc/config/run
                ln -s /home/remstats/etc/config-base/run-stages /home/remstats/etc/config/run-stages

    The new "headerfile" directive for the hosts config-file permits you in
    inject arbitrary information into the host header.
    The new "currentvalue" directive for the rrds config-dir permits you to
    store the current value of variables in status files in the host's data
    directory. Particularly useful in conjunction with the "headerfile"
    directive. Can also be used to permit other processes to act on values
    collected by the collectors.
    A new section, "sar", for the unix-status-server. This runs ""sar -A""
    and parses the result. Unfortunately, there is no consistency about what
    data is available or when the various items should be called, so the
    RRDs are OS-specific.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.8a
    Another minor release.

  New Features
    Added "--with-perl=xxx" option to "configure" in case you need a
    specific version of perl for some reason.
    Added "HTMLDIR", "CGIDIR" and "CGIURL" to the list of magic cookies
    substituted.
    New programs port-query and pattern-query for testing scripts used by
    the port-collector.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.7a
    Another minor release. This one gets rid of GIFs and replaces them by
    png files.

    Also some minor bug-fixes.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.6a
    Oops. There was a small glitch in the install for 1.0.5a. Here's a fixed
    version.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.0.5a
    - [UPGRADE] If you're upgrading from a previous version of remstats,
    you'll have to:
                cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/ntops /home/remstats/etc/config

        after the install of the new version, even though it's effectively
        empty and you're not using the new ntop-collector (yet). See below
        for more pointers on it.

    - [UPGRADE] You'll need to do the following to accomodate the new
    page-writer:
                cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/pages /home/remstats/etc/config/pages
                mkdir /home/remstats/etc/config/page-templates
                cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/page-templates/* /home/remstats/etc/config/page-templates

        after the install of the new version.

    - [UPGRADE] The host "tags" directive, has been renamed to "keys" to
    avoid completely confusing me.
    - [UPGRADE] The new "environment" config-file requires you to:
                cp /home/remstats/etc/config-base/environment /home/remstats/etc/config

        after the install of the new version.

    - The collectors now all will use configuration-supplied IP numbers, if
    they are there, in preference to looking the host-name up in DNS. If you
    find an instance of this not happening, it's a bug.

  New Features
    - RRD config-files can now (like host config-files) have "keys"
    associated with them. This was mainly added for the new page-writer, but
    could be of other use.
    - graph-writer has been replaced by page-writer, which writes directory
    trees of pages from simple templates. The original look of the pages
    graph-writer created has been re-created with 8 templates totalling 94
    lines. Other completely different interfaces can now be created.
    - macinfo a script (and cgi) to look up MAC addresses from an ethernet
    switch via SNMP and show, for each port on the switch, which host is on
    that port (by MAC address or IP number or domain-name, or a
    combination). The related script update-switch-ports will also update
    the description of each interface on the switch, with the host which is
    connected to it.
    - The unix-status-server has some new sections to make available various
    data from /proc under linux, including disk I/O, memory, ...
    - alert-monitor get some new relations: <daystddev, <weekstddev
    <monthstddev (to compare standard-deviations), |> |< (absolute value
    comparisons), delta>, delta< (change comparisons).
    - the links config-file now has a more flexible definition and all the
    links are now configurable.
    - the lockfile script and remstats-backup which uses it.
    - the hosts config-file has a new directive "tags" to allow processing
    of sub-sets of all hosts.
    - The new ntop-collector, configured by the ntops config-file, allows
    you to collect stats on protocol usage distribution.
    - The graph.cgi script now allows the time-span to be user-specified,
    and also the graph width and height.
    - All the collectors now accept "-H", "-G" and "-T" flags to allow them
    to be run on subsets of all hosts, for an explicit list of hosts ("-H"),
    all hosts in a list of groups ("-G"), or hosts which have a particular
    tag ("-T").
    - A new dbi-collector to collect information from remote databases. Look
    at the rrd "dbitest1" for an example of how to create your own.
    - A new config-file environment to set up the environment for children
    of run-remstats.
    - The log-server implements a new function "lastof" to permit it to
    match patterns, while maintaining state from previous runs. See the RRD
    "nfsproblems" for an example.
    - A new utility remstats-rrdtune to tune all the RRD files to match the
    remstats RRD definitions. Or as much tuning as rrdtool will do. The big
    one that you probably wanted, mucking with archives, it doesn't do.

Release Notes for Remstats version 1.00a4
    [There is no version 1.00a3.]

    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 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
    /home/remstats/etc/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
    /home/remstats/etc/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 /home/remstats/etc/config-base/alert-template-map .
                mkdir alert-templates
                cp /home/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 Wed May 28 11:54:44 EDT 2003 by <terskine@users.sourceforge.net>.

