{bb} bbgen 3.0 is now available

[Henrik Stoerner <henrik-bb@hswn.dk>]

Version 3.0 of the bbgen toolkit is now available on www.deadcat.net.

The changes from the previous version are almost entirely in the
network tester, bbtest-net. For the other tools only a single minor
bug-fix is included. And as with any ".0" release, you may want to be
a bit cautious with this one. Although a couple of beta-testers have
provided feedback, and it has been running on my own servers for some
time, there may still be a bug or two that haven't been found yet.

So what are the major changes:

* The new version no longer relies on the "CURL" library for
  performing HTTP tests. This makes it possible to run all network
  tests in parallel; bbgen 2.x would run one http test at a time. So
  if you have many http tests, you will see a major speedup in the
  network tests.

* The ping tests now run simultaneously with the other network tests.
  If you have a large number of hosts to ping, and you also have many
  network tests, this can effectively cut the time needed for the
  network tests by 50%; bbgen 2.x would wait for the ping tests to
  complete before running the other network tests.

* A new library, C-ARES, is now being used for DNS lookups. This
  allows bbtest-net to perform all DNS lookups in parallel, and gives
  greater control over how to timeout DNS lookups in case of problems
  with your DNS servers. C-ARES is included with bbgen. An additional
  bonus is that the "dig" and "dns" tests no longer rely on external
  programs for testing DNS servers; this is now handled internally by
  bbtest-net using the C-ARES library.

* The "conn" test can now ping multiple IP-adresses for each host.
  This is my attempt at defining a connectivity-test for a multi-
  homed host, I am interested to hear if there are better suggestions
  to how it could be done.

A number of other features were added, see the Changes file for the
full list.

These changes have caused a number of commandline options to be
removed. Also, the TIMEOUT tag for specifying a timeout for HTTP tests
is deprecated. So you may have to update both your bb-hosts file and
the bb-network.sh script to accomodate the new version; see the
UPGRADE file for details.

One problem that has popped up during testing is that the increase in
the number of concurrent tests can actually flood your BBNET server
and/or your network - resulting in sporadic timeouts of servers that
run perfectly OK, and longer responsetimes for network services if you
track this with LARRD. The best way to handle this problem is to lower
the number of concurrent network tests with the "--concurrency=N"
option for bbtest-net; the default is operating system dependant, but
will typically be 256. You may need to reduce this to 100 or even 50
if you have many HTTP tests. Feedback on this is very welcome, as I
may choose to lower the default setting if it is problematic.


Best regards,

Henrik
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