{bb} bbgen 3.1 available

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

I've just finished uploading bbgen 3.1 to www.deadcat.net.

It's been 3 weeks since 3.0 was released, and the new version is
primarily a bug-fix release to solve the issues found in the 3.0
version. The most serious of these have been issues with the new
resolver library not looking at the /etc/hosts file; DNS tests failing
because version 3.0 used a strict query instead of using the
search-domain list; and an issues with checks of banners returned by
some tcp services. All in all there have been fewer issues than I had
expected with the new code, and so I am fairly pleased that it has
worked so well for the majority of Brothers.

A couple of improvements did make it into 3.1. Werner Michels provided
a patch so the bb-findhost CGI script can now use regular expressions
when searching for hosts. Very useful - thanks. DNS tests can now do
more than one query, and use any type of DNS query you want; see the
"dns" description in bb-hosts(5) for details on how to set that up.

And finally a new tool is available: bbproxy, a proxy server for
forwarding Big Brother status messages e.g. from firewalled clients to
a Big Brother server. It will also try to merge small "status"
messages into larger "combo" messages - this results in fewer
connections going to your BBDISPLAY server, which in my real-life
scenario actually reduced the load significantly on the BBDISPLAY
server. bbproxy also acts as a buffer between the BBNET server and the
BBDISPLAY server, so when BBNET sends hundreds of status updates after
completing the network tests, bbproxy absorbs these and passes them on
to the BBDISPLAY server in a controlled manner, bringing down the peak
load that your BBDISPLAY server would have to handle. For me, it
actually means that the network tests complete faster, and have fewer
problems getting the messages to the BBDISPLAY server than when it
tried sending them directly.

See below for the full list of changes.


Regards,

Henrik



Version 3.1 (28 Sep 2004)
-------------------------

Bugfixes
* The "dns" and "dig" tests now use the ares_search()
  function instead of ares_query(). This should make
  these tests behave correctly when querying DNS servers
  using a non-FQDN name as the query.
* On systems with /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/host.conf and/or
  /etc/svc.conf, DNS lookups will now use DNS and /etc/hosts
  in the order set by the these files. In bbgen 3.0, they
  were ignored and all lookups would use DNS first. The default
  (if neither of these files define the order) has now also been
  changed to use /etc/hosts first, DNS second.
* dns2.c would not compile on AIX and HP-UX due to a missing
  definition of T_SRV in the standard system header files.
  We now work around this by conditionally defining it
  ourselves.
* Banners for ssh-, imap- and pop-tests are now retrieved
  correctly. bbgen 3.0 erroneously cleared the TCP_BANNER
  setting and all the other options.
* If no banner is received at all then services that look
  for a banner should report failure, same as they do
  when something different than the expected is seen.
* Tests that used a known service, but had the portnumber
  explicitly listed (e.g. "pop3:110"), would fail to pick
  up the service definition from bb-services thus not
  knowing e.g. whether to use SSL or not, or whether to
  grab the banner or not.
* Unreadable/missing files are now reported correctly by
  the bbgen history load routine. Previously, all file-
  names appeared to be directories.

Improvements
* The ARES resolver can now be disabled, for those sites
  that need the traditional resolver (e.g. if you use NIS).
  In that case, use the --no-ares option for bbtest-net.
  This can have some bad effects if your DNS server is
  not behaving properly; see the bbtest-net(1) man-page
  for a discussion of this option.
* dns/dig tests can now perform multiple queries for any type
  of DNS data.
* You can now select the color of the status when the
  TCP tests fail due to receiving something different
  than what was expected. Use "--checkresponse=COLOR".
* Werner Michels provided the necessary patch to make
  the bb-findhost CGI support regular expressions to
  look for hosts.

New features
* A new tool, bbproxy, is a high-performance proxy for
  passing messages from Big Brother clients to the
  BBDISPLAY and BBPAGER servers.
--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-==-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
To unsubscribe from this list, or to subscribe to the bb-digest list
send e-mail to mailto:majordomo@bb4.com with unsubscribe bb -and/or-
subscribe bb-digest in the BODY of the message.