19/09/2008: Mailing List 19/09/2008

Dear FreeNATTERS,

I hope all is well, your secure sockets secure and your packets not being demonstrably lost in some dark internet backwater that refuses to acknowledge the fact (do I sound bitter at all?).



- Version 1 in Beta

With a gnashing of FTP clients the new version of FreeNATS is now in beta and has replaced v0 as the current/recommended release. Users should start to see their update available messages light up.

There are still portions of the new version I am unhappy with and do not believe have been robustly tested enough but the core functionality and most of the new stuff seems to be working well... And I have had it with two-track bug fixes. Hopefully these should fall into place during the beta and the current madcap plan is to move to a totally stable release in late October or early November.

If you update from v0 please take the time to read the documentation and see what additional changes (if any) you may need or like to make.

Many thanks to all the users who have participated in the alpha testing - you know who you are even if I have temporarily misplaced the list.



- A Little Smile to Myself

At my proper work we have an enterprise level commercial monitoring system on a physical hardware appliance. Unlike FreeNATS it does SNMP and all that other funky stuff you really need to keep a myriad of diverse servers healthy with the minimum effort (obviously in addition to my range of PHP and C utilities scattered around to test environment-specific stuff). To be honest, it's quite a good system and I don't want to knock it in any way really.

However for various reasons it went bye-bye recently and we were without it for a while. Getting it back and setting various new things up on it made me realise a few things though... Other than SNMP and it's nicer UI (IE only though) it does pretty much only what FreeNATS does and in some respects not as much. I can't do a wide range of agentless (server-side) testing (the emphasis is on ping and SNMP) and I can't develop plug-ins for it or interface via an API or other coolness.

This brought a little smile to my face but no respite from my work colleagues who merely think I am more than a little strange to spend my spare time writing networking code and then giving it all away for free (even though I cheerily admit the system is a bit pants). They obviously don't know the fun I have. Well, maybe not fun, but it fills the hours between waking, working, eating and sleeping with something other than crying and watching the Jeremy Kyle show.

They don't know what they're missing out on.



As always please let me know any comments, suggestions or bugs via the forum or direct feedback link.

Regards,

Dave



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

Forum: http://forum.purplepixie.org

Documentation: http://www.purplepixie.org/freenats/wiki

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

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