Balancing Load Across Systems (Ballast) / News: Recent posts

CHANGES
- Fixed i/o load collection on 4.18+ kernels due to diskstats format change

CHANGES
- Added --stdin/--stdout to agent to allow data propagation via ssh hops
- Added --no-wait to agent to skip random wait on manual invocation
- Added --add to server to allow data insertions from external sources
- Added --purge to server to allow manual data removals
- Added built-in Twofish encryption for more sensitive info
- Added config setting root_hook to allow collection of root-level info
- Added config setting data_host_any for servers with multiple interfaces
- Added config setting use_fqdn to strip or not strip domain from hosts
- Fixed inadvertent timeout during ingestion of large load data
- Fixed missing Time::Zone sometimes needed for embedded Date::Parse

CHANGES
- Added Debian packaging files (contribution by J. Fernyhough)
- Added installation via make
- Changed documentation to man page format and expanded information
- Fixed collection of user I/O info when agent becomes non-root user
- Fixed compiler warning in C client
- Removed makeenv.sh as it was only for AIX systems with C client

CHANGES
- Added --jsondump to dump stats in JSON format (contribution by B. Roose)
- Added systemd service config for ballastd (contribution by B. Roose)
- Added use_ip_address config option to reference hosts by IP
address instead of host name (contribution by B. Roose)
- Added user_gid variable for use in balancing policies (github issue #4)
- Changed stats generation for better performance with large log files

CHANGES
- Added abort on read/write errors to built-in relay
- Added relay_buffer config option to control i/o size of built-in relay

CHANGES
- Added module dependencies via App::FatPacker so can run with stock perl
- Added built-in XXTEA encryption for communication between agent and server
- Moved ballast-dumpdb functionality into ballastd accessible via --dump
- Moved ballast-logstats functioality into ballastd accessible via --stats
- Changed stats output to use Text::FormatTable instead of Text::Table
- Fixed /proc/net/dev parsing (interface may/may not have space after)

CHANGES
- Fixed evaluation of user_uid (bug report by V. Gouveia)
- Added timeout to server

CHANGES
- Switched database from SDBM_File to DB_File for greatly enhanced stability and performance (previous databases will be invalid)
- Added ability to use different server types based on min/max forks
- Fixed comments in ballastd
- Removed dist target from make file
- Added data alias setting to allow multiple aliases with same data
- Added random wait capability to agent
- Added ability to use line continuation operator (\) in config file
- Agent now tries to detect fully-qualified domain name of host
- Added ability to use extra client arguments in policies
- Updated documentation
- Fixed tcp_allow and tcp_deny examples in config skeleton
- Added ability to setuid/setgid agent
- Added timeout to agent
- Fixed hang during timeout with multiple data servers in C client
- Fixed overwrite of request with multiple data servers in C client
- Fixed backup server handling in perl client when all hosts unavailable

Various bug and doc fixes.

First public release of Ballast.