[openxdas-announce] OpenXDAS 0.4.226 Released!

[John C. <jca...@no...>]

Everyone,
 
This version of the open source reference implementation of the Open Group's XDAS (Distributed Auditing Service) contains several key enhancements - mostly related to filtering, data integrity and performance (client-perceived throughput).  
Filtering and Triggering
 
In past releases, filtering has simply been disabled. Now, with the filtering sub-system in place, we've added not only the ability to filter messages out of the audit logs by event field information, but we've also added trigger scripts. As audit records are submitted that match filtering criteria, trigger scripts are executed by the xdasd service. The scripts can do anything that the system shell can do - and it works in both Unix and Windows. 
 
In the 0.4.226 release of OpenXDAS, filtering is specified in an XML filter file called xdasd.filter. This file format will be documented soon in the upcoming (near) release of the OpenXDAS documentation package. The filter management API is still stubbed out, and still in the works, but will also be implemented in a near future release. 
Performance and Data Integrity
 
Another major enhancement in this release is in the area of data integrity. In past releases, XDAS records were committed to audit logs by the calling thread, so there was little chance of much data being lost, but performance suffered as client applications waited until messages were completely committed to all loggers. 
 
This latest version submits to a FIFO queue, using a background thread to commit to registered loggers. Since there is now a much greater risk of data loss (as the queue may fill up and not be emptied immediately) this release uses a disk-based persistent caching mechanism that ensures that audit records are not lost - even between a hard shutdown and restart. As the xdsad service restarts, if it notices messages in the cache, it continues to process them as if it has never been interrupted. 
 
A Note About the Java Package 
 
In order to show that the Java client package is maintained at the same pace as the C package (containing the service and the C client libraries), the Java package has been incorporated into the main package, and will release along side of the C service and client library. This change includes both the Java client jar file, and the javadoc bz2 and zip files (in conjunction with the doxygen documentation generated from the C source code). 
 
The java source code is integrated into the source distribution, so java source can be obtained by downloading one of the source distribution packages.
 
Enjoy!