mon News
4-May-1999
CareTracker is back online and ready to accept bug reports and
feature suggestions for mon. See the
bug tracking system
for more details.
30-Apr-1999
Released 0.38.12.
Changes between mon-0.38.11 and mon-0.38.12
---------------------------------------------
-Fixed "list descriptions" bug submitted by Vad Adamluk
-Added "last_check" and "monitor" output to client list
opstatus. opstatus.cgi uses this. Only works for 0.38.* protocol.
-opstatus.cgi now uses Mon::Client, and some bug fixes and enhancements.
-Removed "bind" from ftp.monitor http.monitor http_t.monitor imap.monitor
nntp.monitor pop3.monitor smtp.monitor. It was unnecessary.
27-Apr-1999
Released 0.38.11, which fixes a bug which would cause some alerts to
not be invoked.
26-Apr-1999
I just put 0.38.10 into the "BETA" directory on kernel.org. Thanks for
the feedback, and keep testing :)
$Id: CHANGES,v 1.30 1999/04/27 02:45:03 trockij Exp $
Changes between mon-0.38.9 and mon-0.38.10
---------------------------------------------
-Fixed a bug where call_alert didn't set _last_alert correctly,
thus causing things like alertevery to not work properly.
-Small bug fix in handle_trap_timeout
-Removed some debugging junk for dtlogging
-A few code cleanups here and there
-Fixed @groupargs problem in call_alert
26-Apr-1999
Released mon-0.38.9 and Mon-0.4. This is a feature freeze, and
only bugfixes will be included into the 0.38.* branch. New features
will be added into the new 0.39.* branch.
Changes between mon-0.38.8 and mon-0.38.9
---------------------------------------------
-Removed %var% substitution in favor of -M, which pre-processes the config
file with m4. Macro expansion should be handled by software whose sole
purpose is to perform macro expansion, hence m4.
-Added an "example.m4" in the etc/ directory.
-Added "fail" trap.
-Pass _op_status value to alerts via env variable MON_OPSTATUS.
-Updated file.alert to log MON_OPSTATUS.
-Fixed bug in client buffer handling where a blank line submitted by
the client would prevent all future commands from being processed.
-The server no longer disconnects the client on an invalid command.
-Added "--disabled" and "--state" commands to monshow. Showing disabled
hosts is no longer the default. The defaults can be set in ~/.monshowrc.
This requires the latest Perl module (Mon-0.4). Also added "--old" option.
-Added man page for monshow.
-Updated some docs in mon.1
-Don't complain if userfile does not exist and the authtype is not userfile.
-Patched in Gilles' historicfile stuff, and documented it in mon.1, and fixed
some bugs.
-Alerts are no longer called with -l parameter. It's never been documented,
and no alerts use it, so I'm ditching it.
-version command returns a value like "0.38.9" rather than a float.
-Separated alert calling function from the function which determines
if an alert should be called.
-Alerts are now forked with a separate environment than the parent.
-"test alert|upalert|startupalert" client command added, which will immediately
call an alert for testing purposes. Updated the docs for moncmd to reflect
this command.
20-Apr-1999
Released mon-0.38.8 and Mon-0.3.
Changes between mon-0.38pre7 and $Name: mon-0-38-8 $
---------------------------------------------
-mon is now kept under CVS control (exclusively to maintain my own
personal sanity). The Perl module is distributed as a separate file now,
so that it can find its home in the CPAN module directory.
-Documented "traptimeout" and "trapduration", and cleaned up
some docs in mon.1.
-Included upalerts and startupalerts in gen_scriptdir_hash()
-Lots of code cleanups in read_cf.
-alertafter now has two forms, one just like before, and
one with a single integer argument which alerts after some number of
consecutive failures.
-I should have done this long ago. %watch now looks like this:
$watch{$group}->{$service}
instead of
$watch{$group}[$service]
and $service is the text of the service, not an integer.
-Lots of code cleanups regarding global variables which are
altered by read_cf.
-Fixed "list successes" and "list failures" command.
-Added "clear timers" command which clears the timers
for things like alertafter and alertevery and such.
-netappfree.monitor has some MIB reading changes which fixes the
core dumping problem.
-Added set_op_status.
-Removed some debug cruft from check_depend.
-Fix to $fhandles{"$group/$service"}.
-Updated "-h" output to be accurate.
-Test -f to see if an alert or monitor exists before trying to
exec it.
-gilles reported a problem with the servertime output, which was fixed.
-"interval" initialization was supplying a default interval,
which isn't cool because it didn't allow you to have a service w/o an
interval for use as a trap sink. The new default is undef.
-I started work on muxpect, which is sort of a combination of the mux
capabilities of fping and doing Expect-style chat sequences over TCP
sockets. It is meant to replace those millions of TCP-based monitors
in the mon.d directory with a less CPU-intensive version.
-Some alert decision code moved from proc_cleanup to do_alert where
it belongs.
-Changed some trap code.
21-Mar-1999
Released 0.38pre7.
Changes between mon-0.38pre6 and mon-0.38pre7
---------------------------------------------
-Added "basedir=" and -b, and "cfbasedir=" and -B
-use usleep.
-Added startupalerts which are called upon startup.
-alerts called with env variable MON_ALERTTYPE
-logdir, added downtime logging via dtlogging/dtlogfile
-Periods can now be specified using a LABEL: tag (similar to
labeling blocks and loops in Perl). This allows multiple periods with
the same period value. This feature is useful because the "alertafter"
and "alertevery" counters are kept on a per-period basis.
-Fixed process.monitor to use the new values for the process table
in the UCD MIB.
-Fixed a problem with reload and path/file expansion.
-Alerts are now called with MON_RETVAL set to the exit value of the
monitor.
-Added trap.alert. Not quite documented.
-Added version command to Mon::Client, thanks to nagel@intelenet.net.
1-Mar-1999
Release mon-0.38pre6. Please test. Includes dialin.monitor and some
bug fixes. See CHANGES for details.
27-Feb-1999
Added a couple of more things to the FAQ.
17-Feb-1999
Added a couple of things to the FAQ.
24-Jan-1999
Released mon-0.38pre5.
Changes between mon-0.38pre4 and mon-0.38pre5
---------------------------------------------
-Fixed bug #3, problem with %alias
-Fixed bug #4, problem with unpacking a socket which wasn't
really a socket yet (out of order assignments)
-Renamed Client to Mon-0.01 to follow the Perl module naming
convention better, and to make room for things like logging
modules and such.
-Implemented more protocol commands to Mon::Client. Only 4 left...
-Adjusted nntp.monitor to allow for some protocol / implementation
inconsistencies. The commands now strictly follow RFC977.
-Fixed problem with 0.38 protocol and Mon::Client.
-Added multiple authentication types, including getpwnam, shadow,
and userfile. Read the man page for details.
-Added "version" client command to identify the protocol version.
-Added host + user authentication to traps. Configuration is done
in auth.cf. No documentation yet.
-Added simple downtime logging, and documented it in mon.1.
-Tiny change to reboot.monitor.
-Added Mon::SNMP module to decode SNMP traps.
-Added pod to Mon::Client. I think it took as long to
code it as it did to document it.
9-Jan-1999
Some web page updates. 0.38pre5 is coming along, and should be released
this weekend. I think I've nailed the "upalerts with dependencies"
problem.
28-Dec-1998
New bug tracking for mon, from the guys at LinuxCare.
I figured I'd take advantage of someone else doing work for us :)
21-Dec-1998
Released mon-0.38pre4.
Changes between mon-0.38pre3 and mon-0.38pre4
---------------------------------------------
-Added fixes from Chris Adams that correct some $ALERTDIR
and monitor argument problems.
-Fixes to monstatus from brian moore.
-Another fix to get the "exit=n" stuff working with alerts again, broken
because of ALERTHASH code.
-Wrote "monshow" in the clients directory, which is a per-user configurable
command-line client.
-Mon::Client perl module included to help simplify writing clients. It
doesn't implement a number of commands yet. Look at the end of Client.pm
to see which commands have been implemented and which have not been.
"monshow" is in the clients directory, and it is an example of how to
use the Mon::Client module.
Mon::Client also needs POD documentation.
14-Dec-1998
Back from the USENIX LISA conference Boston, and I did a little
work on mon while on the plane and in the room, so here is 0.38pre3.
Changes between mon-0.38pre2 and mon-0.38pre3
---------------------------------------------
-Added "ack" client command, which will acknowledge a service failure and
surppress all further alerts for that service while it continues to fail.
See the moncmd man page for details. You can "ack" with a string of
text.
-alertdir and scriptdir can now contain multiple colon-separated
paths. This feature is useful for keeping site-specific monitors
and alerts in their own directory which is separate from the monitors
which are distributed with mon itself. Updated the docs for this.
A hash is generated after each time the configuration is read
which holds the location of where each monitor and alert script can
be found. Errors are reported via syslog, so pay attention to them.
-Some "alias" code tweaks. Gilles, does it work??? If no, send
the patch.
-Poked a little with the trap code. The trap now contains
a "spc" tag which specifies the specific type of trap, like maybe
SNMPv1 or SNMPv2 or "mon 0.38".
-An update to rpc.monitor to let it build under Solaris. It can now
also check to see if an arbitrary RPC program number is registered.
Documentation updates.
-Dependencies are still broken, because I haven't spent any time at
all looking at them.
30-Nov-1998
Release of *ALPHA* 0.38pre2 (notice the numbering change).
Changes between mon-0.38pre1 and mon-0.38pre2
---------------------------------------------
-Some fixed from brian moore to correct client hangups
-netappfree.monitor changes, including --list option to
list the filesystems on the filers for help in building a config file.
-Trap handling changes, including packet . More provisions
for direct SNMP handling. I might add direct provisions for mon to take
SNMP traps directly. UCD SNMP trap handling callback mechanism doesn't
fit into mon very well.
-"list opstatus" output is now different
-Time::HiRes is now required. The trick is that handle_io() wants
to spend $SLEEPINT handling I/O from clients. Some OSs allow select(2)
to return the time remaining, which we want because if select returned
in say, 0.2 seconds then we want to call select with a timeout of 0.8
seconds so that we get the full second of waiting for I/O. Some OSs
do *not* return the time remaining from a select call, and time(2)
doesn't return sub-second resolution, so we need gettimeofday(2) to
figure out how long select spent waiting. I guess the whole point here
is to try to handle traps as soon as they come in.
-Fixed @last_failures discrepancy with traps.
-Added Gilles' alias record stuff to config file
-Included Jon Meek's up_rtt.monitor which checks the availability of
hosts and logs some statistics, like min/mean/max round trip times.
Requires Time::HiRes and Statistics::Descriptive.
2-Nov-1998
Release of *ALPHA* 0.pre38a. This release is primarily meant for people who
can help fix bugs, so I wouldn't try running expect this to release to work
well for everyone.
4-Oct-1998
Added link to Tim Potter's archive of the mailing list. Much better than
the half-assed archive that I threw together :)
mon-0.38 should be released within a week or so. It includes Jing Tan's
dependency code, asynchronous event handling (mon is now distributed), a
few new client commands, some bug fixes, some new monitors, new disabling
behavior (you can disable a group/service/host for a particular duration,
and mon will re-enable it when the time comes).
2-Aug-1998
Updated the FAQ to point to CPAN and some other places, and added a
question and answer submitted by Rikhardur Egilsson .
13-Jul-1998
Released 0.37l. Lots of changes.
$Id: CHANGES,v 1.7 1998/07/13 04:23:53 trockij Exp $
Changes between mon-0.37k and mon-0.37l
---------------------------------------
-Config parser change from Michael Griffith that
complains when "alertafter" will never trigger an alert.
-Added "savestate" and "loadstate". Currently these only save
and load the state of things disabled.
-The server now can authenticate clients using a simple
configuration file which can restrict certain users to
using only some (or all) commands. "moncmd" was updated
to support this feature.
-Addition of "upalerts" which may be called when a service
changes state from failure to success. "upalerts" can be
controlled by the "upalertafter" parameter.
-"alertevery" now ignores detailed output when it decides
whether or not to send an alert. Patch submitted by
brian moore .
-"hostgroup and hyphen" patch. This simple patch will allow
hyphens and periods in hostgroup tags.
-Multiline output fixes in smtp.monitor
-Now monitors are not called when no host arguments are supplied. This
can be overridden with the per-service "allow_empty_group" option.
-A fix to ftp.monitor by Tiago Severina which allows
for multiple 220 lines in the greeting from the FTP server.
-Added snpp.alert, contributed by Mike Dorman .
This requires the SNPP Perl module.
-Added ldap.monitor, contributed by David Eckelkamp .
This requires the Net::LDAPapi module.
-Added dns.monitor, contributed by David Eckelkamp .
This requires the Net::DNS module.
-Monitor definitions can now include shell-like quoted words, as defined by
the Text::ParseWords module (included with perl5). e.g.:
monitor something.monitor -f "this is an argument" -a arg
-"allow_empty_group" is a new per-service option. If set, monitors will
still be run even if all hosts in the applicable hostgroup have been
disabled. The default is that allow_empty_group is not set.
-Monitors are now forked with stdin connected to /dev/null.
-Added "stop" and "start" commands which let make the server cease from
scheduling any monitors. While stopped, clients can still be handled. The
server may be started[sic] in "stopped" mode with -S. There is now a
"reset stopped", which is an atomic version of "reset" and "stop". This
is useful if you want to re-disable things immediately after a reset,
so there will be no race conditions after the reset and before you
disable things.
opstatus.cgi now also reports the state of the scheduler.
-Updated documentation for monitors, the main "mon" manual,
and the "moncmd" manual.
-Fixed a few problems in handle_client that had to do with shutting
the server down.
15-May-1998
- Released 0.37k.
- Added netappfree.monitor, which uses SNMP to get the free space
from Network Appliance filers. Uses a configuration file to
set low-watermarks for each filer.
- Added process.monitor (thanks to Brian Moore), which
queries the UCD SNMP agents to determine if there are errors with
particular processes on a machine. This is very useful for monitoring
those processes which seem to die off on occasion :)
29-Apr-1998
- Added hpnp.monitor, which uses SNMP to query your HP JetDirect
boards in your printers, and warns you when things go awry.
For example, if there is a paper jam, mon can send out email
telling you exactly that, and it includes in the mail the
current readout on the printer's LCD.
- Some small bugfixes reported by a few individuals.
- http.monitor can now accept a specific URL instead of
defaulting to "/".
14-Apr-1998
- Configuration parser now dies when a watch is "accidentally" re-defined.
- Added process throttle to prevent a number of forked processes
to go beyond a given value. This is a paranoia "safety net" setting.
5-Apr-1998
- Added "randstart" and "randskew" parameters that can help balance
out the load from services which are sheduled at the same interval.
- Added "exit=range" argument to "alert", which allows triggering
alerts based on the exit status of a monitor script.
- Added an IMAP monitor, and an SNMP "reboot" monitor
- Added a "ping.monitor" for people who would rather not use "fping".
"fping" is still the right tool for the job, however.
- Added http_t.monitor, contributed by Jon Meek (meekj@pt.cyanamid.com).
- Merged in patches supplied by Roderick Schertler, who has built
a Debian package from the mon sources:
- Changes to mon:
- Support a pid file. This is necessary for the system's
daemon control script (which stops and starts the daemon, plus
tells it to reload its configuration) to work.
- Treat SIGINT like SIGTERM (for interactive debugging).
- Allow a hostgroup line in mon.cf which doesn't have any host
names (useful for putting each host name on a line by itself).
- Add d (meaning days) to the list of suffixes accepted by
the interval and alertevery keywords.
- Squelch extra blank line output by alerthist and failurehist
commands if there are no corresponding history entries.
- Bug fix: fork() returns undef, not -1, on error.
- Set umask 022, no 0.
- Changes to mon.cgi:
- Set -T mode.
- Allow all local info fields to be blank, and set them that way
by default.
- Use the same default mon host as the other interfaces.
- Use $ENV{SCRIPT_NAME} as the default $url.
- Don't hardcode the path to mon, assume it is in the path.
- Vet the name passed to the list group command. The old code
would allow remote users to run arbitrary local commands.
- Changes to opstatus.cgi:
- Set -T mode.
- Correct port, was 32768 should be 32777.
- Add missing Content-Type to html_die().
- In monstatus correct the my() line in populate_group(), and add
missing $group initialization.
- Tweak typesetting in the mon.1 and moncmd.1 man pages.
19-Jan-1998
New distribution site, hosted by Transmeta.
Fixed a minor bug in fping.monitor which will cause the script
to return the unpingable hosts in the order in which they were
detected unpingable, not sorted. This will mess up the "alertevery"
mechanism, because the output from the might change, even though
the same hosts are still unpingable.
Also, added the GPL header everywhere, since I want to be sure that everyone
understands that this code is GPLed.
12-Jan-1998
I've released mon-0.37g as an interim between 0.37f and 0.38. Primarily
it fixes a nasty memory leak which was caused by IPC::Open2 (which was
really not needed, anyway).
Here are some of the enhancements:
- Fixed the problem where the server would die if it got
a reset command at just the wrong time.
- Server now handles multiple commands per client connection,
and opstatus.cgi has been modified to take advantage
of this. The status page is now very fast because it doesn't
need to make a separate connection per command.
- Includes a SkyTel 2-Way pager interface to moncmd! Now you
can query the status of your server using your 2-way pager,
with password authentication. I just had to let
this one out of the box :)
- Art Chan was generous enough to contribute his interactive,
web-based interface to mon. Finally, mon now has buttons to click!
- David Eckelkamp has also donated another command-line client
that is very similar to opstatus.cgi, but is not a web interface.
More power to the command-line people like us!
11-Nov-1997
It's been a while since an update, and things have been busy.
However, the new version (0.38) is well on its way, and it already
has a good number of new features. See the
development page for some updates.
9-Oct-1997
Added something to the FAQ. It has two items now-- things are
definitely getting out of control.
3-Oct-1997
Released mon-0.37f, which includes some minor bugfixes submitted
by a few generous people.
Changes are:
Changes between mon-0.37e and mon-0.37f
Fri Oct 3 06:14:50 PDT 1997
-Fixed a small typo in "mon.d/freespace.monitor" that would correctly
detect a failure condition for low disk space, but the text that it
would report was incorrect.
-As per Sean Robinson's suggestions, renamed the syslog patches to
Perl 5.004 to accurately reflect what versions of Perl they patch.
-In "mon.d/http.monitor", fixed problem with what matches as a valid
HTTP response. "200 OK" is incorrect, because the text that follows
the 200 is undefined in the specs.
21-Sep-1997
I found a really small (but oh so detrimental) bug in the fping.monitor
that ships with mon-0.37d.tar.gz. It foolishly piped the output
of fping to "sort", which made fping.monitor always return true!!!
Ok, Jim, repeat ten times, "the exit value of a pipeline is the
exit value of the last command in the pipe..." :)
If you've already downloaded mon-0.37d.tar.gz, please get version
0.37e.
20-Sep-1997
Initial release is Sat Sep 20 09:07:51 PDT 1997.
trockij@transmeta.com