[Ganglia-announce] monitoring core v2.1.2 released

[matt m. <ma...@cs...>]

Here is the Changelog entries
   * Added a new CLUSTER element to the XML with two attributes:
     NAME and LOCALTIME.  Necessary for monitoring clusters in
     many different timezones.

This is an important change.  The XML that gmond is changed as of this 
version.  I added the CLUSTER element to allow for clusters across 
multiple timezones and handle clock synchronization problems.  The next 
release of ganglia will have a C API (libganglia) and you'll see more 
clearly why this is so important.

   * Preston Smith updated the FreeBSD monitoring code to include all metrics
     which are monitored under Linux except number of running processes,
     absolute cpu idle time, and shared memory.  SMP users may find that
     freebsd's cp_time sysctls is not completely accurate under FreeBSD stable
     meaning CPU%s might be inaccurate.  However, it works under FreeBSD-CURRENT.

Great news for FreeBSD users.  You can now monitor the same metric as 
Linux boxes.  I'm hoping to get all the Solaris metrics going soon too 
(volunteers?:).  Thanks again Preston Smith!

   * Fixed the getopt_long() call in gmond.c thanks to feedback from
     Meik Hellmund.  The getopt_long() parameters didn't match the
     switch() statement breaking the "trusted_host" option.

Dumb mistake on my part.. version 2.1.1's "trusted_host" parameter didn't 
get processed at all.

   * Fixed a bug in gmond where connections from untrusted hosts caused
     segfaults.  Error caused by passing datum_free() a NULL pointer in
     server_thread() of ./gmond/server.c.

   * Changed the way transient nameservice errors are handled by
     pre_process_node() in ./gmond/listen.c.  Previously, transient errors
     were retried but now they are treated as errors (although gmond
     will continue trying to resolve the host when it gets a new
     multicast packet from it)

   * Updated the ganglia.spec file to merge gmond and gmetric into a single
     RPM, fixed some small bugs, and updated the RPM information.

You only need to download and install a single RPM now.  Simpler 
installation.  Before if you wanted to install gmetric you had to install 
a separate RPM.

   * Changed the gmetric options to also support long options and updated
     the help output (from -h, --help) to be much more descriptive

The ganglia C API is coming together nicely and should be released in the 
next week or so.  Once I have this API, I'll rewrite ganglia-rrd.pl in C 
to make the installation MUCH simpler (just install an RPM/ no need for 
Perl Modules and expat).

Have a great weekend!
-matt