28/08/2008: Mailing List 28/08/2008

Dear FreeNATTERs,

I hope all is well in your data centers and your racks are humming nicely. We had a power outage here which took out FreeNATS HQ as well as my real work. Standing in my titchy front room data center let alone one of the work ones without power was very freakily quiet. Of course the main FreeNATS site was unaffected, hosted as it is by Verrotech a long way away from here and powered not by electricity but the Breath of Angels.

So the latest FreeNATS news...

1. Version 1... No (major) disasters yet

The current alpha trial of version 1.x continues apace. Thanks to user feedback the many bugs seem mostly ironed out. The agented nodeside testing seems to be working ok if not easily horribly affected by SELinux. Also I tried the Windows nodeside agent on a WinXP box the other day which would not reckognise SwbemRefreshObject or some such (but it did capitalise it correctly which I hadn't done in code so it must know of it, blasted Windows).

I am hopeful that it can move into beta some time in September and will at this point become the standard recommended release. Primarily this will depend on the final alpha feedback and testing of the upgrade path. It should upgrade from v0 but does add environmental dependencies and requires a crontab change for test periods under five minutes to work.

If you are running v1 and have any feedback - positive, negative, neutral, a suggestion, just the fact it updated ok or you had to run something twice etc etc then please let me know via the forum/site.

If you're not running it already then why not give it a go on a test VM?



2. If it ends in world.com then FreeNATS is probably on it

FreeNATS had a nice review as part of an article on 12 cross-platform apps by Ron Barret. Originally appearing on networkworld.com this has been syndicated all over the place to many many world.com ending sites.

Stanford University Network Monitoring Tools page though continues to be the largest referrer by far, bless them and their cotton socks.



3. Developers Welcome

Version 1 incorporates the ability for developers to extend FreeNATS functionality by writing their own tests or event handlers. I have already had some feedback from people both using the intended development route and looking to hack the hell out of the main code itself to replace some core functionality (all are welcome, this is a GPL party).

But... if you are looking to develop with FreeNATS and want any major changes made now is the time to do it. Whilst v1 is still in alpha I am willing (when it is the only possible way) to add useful functionality even if it requires core interface changes that would break existing code. Once the system is beta and beyond I aim to develop the system in such a way that site customisations will always continue to function in future releases. Well... until version 2 ;o)



As always please get in touch with any suggestions or comments. Got any good news stories suitable for shameless marketing? Get in touch.

Regards,

Dave

Site: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats

News: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/news.php

Forum: http://forum.purplepixie.org

Feedback: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/feedback.php

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