Big Sister / News: Recent posts

After years of source-only access to modifications and "private" releases, it is time for a complete public release. Besides a few pure maintainance modifications 1.12 comes with multitenancy support, views, support for Visio designed maps.

Phinex AG and Reto Schaub have sponsored a modern and more professional look for the BigSister project home page. Thanks a lot!

The web site has also been moved to the Phinex web servers in order to increase its availability.

A number of new plugins featuring various SNMP based health checks have been released. They are ready for download/installation from http://www.bigsister.ch/plugins.html .

Many thanks to Niels Baggesen for these contributions!

While Big Sister is and will always be a non-commercial freeware software project it is however linked with non-commercial and commercial real world. The Big Sister project web site tries to feature this links a little bit more than in the past.

You might need help in deploying Big Sister, guaranteed response to problems you get or other external support. In this case you might want to have a look at http://www.bigsister.ch/profis.html, a page listing companies offering professional services around Big Sister.... read more

The NetApp plugin now available from the plugins download page (http://www.bigsister.ch/plugins.html) makes the 'disk' health check available for remote NetApp Filer monitoring.

Release 1.02 comes with rather unspectacular new functionality. Besides the new performance data database allowing Big Sister to display more expressive charts (see http://www.bigsister.ch/snapshots.html\) and simple statistical analysis of trends, the new SLA report generator does now processcollected availability data into management readable form. A few new health checks have been implemented - such as the new ping test collecting line performance data, a file access performance test, the BT-Ethernetbox test monitoring environmental data (see http://www.messpc.de/\) and a new interface for custom-made health checks. Of course, a number of bugs have also been fixed.... read more

Revision 2 of the Big Sister Agent for Windows MSI package fixes an annoying problem: If running as a service the agent stopped whenever a user interactively logged out of the Windows machines console. The agent 1.00rev2 now ignores user logoffs as one would expect from a background service.

The searchable online version of the Big Sister manual 1.9 is available now. Browse through it on http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister

The official Big Sister manual has been brought up to date. Release 1.9 of the manual is in sync with the development version of Big Sister and the forthcoming 1.01 release. Besides numerous other changes the manual includes a new health check reference section as well as a chapter on the new database backend.

The PDF manual is available from http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister - the HTML version will follow in a few days.

An up-to-date release of the ".exe"-Version of Big Sister has been promised long ago. Now, we just have made a big step forward to achieving this: a pre-release of the Agent for Windows is ready for download at

http://www.bigsister.ch/unstable.html

Note that we are going to release Big Sister for Windows as MSI package in the future starting from now.

Please have a look at it, test it, comment it. We need your feedback.... read more

Big Sister is an SNMP aware network and system monitoring application. Release 0.99c3 is a service release solving a few issues, including a few modules that have been available via separate downloads for a while, and officially including debian packages.

There is no official Windows package for this release, installing on Windows from source is of course still possible. Windows binaries not requiring perl will be released within the next two or three months.

Big Sister is a multi platform SNMP-aware system and network monitoring application. The latest news is nearly one year old and people start wondering if Big Sister is still developed.

The answer is "yes, slowly, but yes". In order to get a little information out we have published a rough roadmap on http://bigsister.graeff.com/roadmap.html. - please have a glance at it in order to find out what is to be coming next.

Big Sister is a multi platform SNMP-aware system and network monitoring application. Now available is bstray for Mac OS X, a small client application displaying the overall network status permanently on screen without the need for a permanently running web browser.

Bstray for Mac OS X has been contributed by Jeremy Robson and is available via the download page on http://bigsister.graeff.com/.

Big Sister is a multi platform SNMP-aware system and network monitoring application. A successfull prototype installation on an iSeries machine (AS/400) has been made and fully documented.

The Detailed documentation on how to get the Big Sister agent running on AS/400 has been contributed by Mihael Knezevic and is available via the Big Sister documentation project's home page http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister.... read more

Big Sister is an SNMP aware cross-platform system and network monitoring application. For the current release the Windows specific code has been brought up-to-date and tested against newer versions of Windows.

Many special thanks go to Joaquim Homrighausen of Webbplatsen, who sponsored the Windows port. His words:

"Sponsored by WebbPlatsen i Sverige, Stockholm Sweden. Free your mind, free the source. Thanks to Thomas for all his work with BigSister."... read more

Big Sister is an SNMP aware network and system monitoring application. Release 0.98c8 is a production/stable release mainly fixing a few portability issues and other bugs discovered since 0.98c7 release.

Fixed problems include

- Solaris issues (TCP monitor crashes, swap monitor)
- AIX issues (cpu load monitor)
- perl <5.6 issues (Big Sister works with Perl <
5.6 again)
- Rsync failures
- "users" monitor failures
- .... a few others ...

Big Sister is an SNMP aware network and system monitor

We have just released the latest monitoring module. The "nut" module monitors uninterruptable power supplies under control of the NUT (Network UPS Tools) free software suite. It sends alerts on power breakages, overload and battery problems. The longterm graphing may point you to battery aging problems.

The "nut" module is currently beta. You can install it on top of Big Sister 0.97c7 using the "bsmodule" command, either use "bsmodule install nut" directly, to retrieve and install the nut module via the Big Sister download server or download it manually from: ... read more

After a long time of major code rewrites we are pleased to finally announce a new Big Sister production/stable release. Many new features, the completely rewritten documentation and the revised look&feel have made their way into the world of stable releases, therefore.

If you have still be running the previous stable release (0.97) please go through the release notes of the various 0.98 releases in order to find the numerous changes documented, if you were already running on of the 0.98 series releases you will find out that only a few bug fixes have been made between the latest beta and the new production release.... read more

Big Sister release 0.98b6 for once features many new "visible" features. The backend now is considered stable - only one major bug fix took place.

New features include

- a brand new look
- the new docu (thanks Joerg Fritsch & the docu project team) is included
- status history log in status detail pages
- %Autojoin pattern, %Itemgroup and a few more new displaying options.

For a full list of changes see http://bigsister.graeff.com/pdoc/RELEASE_NOTES-0.98b6.html

Big Sister 0.98 beta 5 has been released shortly after beta 4 in order to avoid too many people loosing too much time with debugging RedHat 9 issues.

Changes between beta5 and beta4 include:

- output a warning if a possible Perl bug (RedHat 9 & UTF-8 support) might prevent Big Sister from working correctly
- fixed an incompatibility between the CGIs and Apache 2.0

The full release notes are available online under http://bigsister.graeff.com/pdoc/RELEASE_NOTES-0.98b5.html

After many months of collecting feedback of beta3 we finally got 0.98 beta 4 out. This is considered a stable release which is more or less identical to the next production release.

Please see the release notes on http://bigsister.graeff.com/pdoc/RELEASE_NOTES-0.98b4.html in order to get an idea on what the differences to beta 3 are.

Big Sister has finally got an official logo. The years of Tom's ugly hand-drawn symbols hurting your eyes are over! Special thanks go to Joerg Fischer, who cared for getting a well-designed logo and banner done. Big Sister is an SNMP-aware network and system monitor.

The Big Sister documentation project has got its own homepage. Joerg Fritsch has set up http://www.joerg.cc/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?BigSister as the authoritative entry point to the documentation project. The site is WiKi based and every one is invited to contribute in order to improve the pages.

Big Sister is included in the forthcoming 8.2 release of SuSE Linux (http://www.suse.de/). As far as we know this is the first time Big Sister made it into a Linux distribution.

This is a good occasion to send a huge "thank you" to SuSE and all the other distributors who do a good job at integrating this whole OSS stuff like Big Sister into some consistent system.

The Bigsister Documentation Project is a joint project to improve and maintain the documentation coming with BigSister. The project is an XML-based DocBook (http://www.docbook.org) approach in order to make it possible to publish one common source accross different media (.pdf, .html a.o.).

Anyone who has (or wants to gain) a little knowledge about structured writing and BigSister is invited to take part. A webpage explaining the basics about using the documentation XML-sources and transforming them into .pdf or .html will be set up in a few days.... read more