Etch System Configuration Management / News: Recent posts

Upgraded server to Rails 3

A small patch release to address a few minor things:

* The warning that etch is defaulting to UID/GID 0 because a user or group was not found is now shown only in debug mode. Change contributed by Marjorie Saltman.
* Fixed a typo in the client Rakefile

This release is now compatible with ruby 1.9. The nokogiri XML parser is now the default parser used by the server.

Add support for nokogiri as a choice of XML libraries in addition to the existing support for libxml and rexml. Switch server to rails 2.3.11.

See etch-users mailing list post for further details.

Add support for a detailed_results setting in the client config file,
allowing users to log detailed results to a local file in addition to or
instead of sending them to the server.

Add --list-files option to client.

The primary change in this release is the addition of support for an /etc/etch.conf config file to the client, allowing users to configure a number of parameters that were previously either hard-coded or only configurable via command-line options.

Bug fix related to relative paths and the --local option. Update to Rails 2.3.8 and the will_paginate gem.

The most significant change in this release is that the client now stores history logs as individual files rather than in RCS. This makes it much easier to view and inspect the history log. Also improved error reporting and automated the process of removing old clients and results from the database.

Explicitly invoke user actions (setup/pre/post/test/etc.) via "sh -c" so that syntax like "FOO=bar myprogram" works

Wrap exceptions from templates with a message indicating the template filename and associated file filename to help the user figure out where the error occurred. Errors from etch scripts were already subject to this treatment.

The client version is now in sync with the overall package version, so with this release the client version jumps from 1.18 to 3.11.... read more

A few bug fixes: the DTD for commands was too strict and rejecting valid commands.xml files in some cases, certain combinations of dependencies and file requests could result in a loop, and the client was a bit too verbose about creating temporary placeholder files.

Files can now depend on commands and vice-versa. <dependcommand> in a config.xml file, <dependfile> in a commands.xml file.

You can now request the processing of specific commands on the command line. This can be mixed with request for specific files as well. So "etch /etc/motd linux_package_commands" should do what you expect, i.e. generate /etc/motd and process the linux_package_commands set of commands.... read more

Add support for configuration commands, i.e. system configuration via commands rather than via configuration files. See http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/etch/wiki/ConfigurationCommands

Add local mode to etch client where it reads configuration from a local directory rather than from a server. This should make testing changes easier, and make it easier for new users to evaluate etch. See https://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/etch/wiki/GettingStarted... read more

This release adds support for client authentication and local requests, updates etch to the latest version of Rails, and includes other feature enhancements and bug fixes. See the release announcement on the etch-users mailing list for more details.

Replace REXML for XML parsing with LibXML. Uses less CPU, which improves scalability, and adds support for DTD validation.

Added some Flash charts to the web dashboard to graphically show client count and status.

Converted the cron job wrapper script from Perl to Ruby so the client package no longer depends on Perl.

Various other minor bug fixes.

The major feature in this release is the addition of results reporting. The client now gathers any output shown to the user and the success/failure associated with each managed file as well as the overall success of the run and reports that to the server. A web UI was added to the server for viewing and searching these results, as well as statistics about the overall health of your etch environment.... read more