[Announce] monit 5.0 beta

[Jan-Henrik Haukeland]

Monit 5.0 beta is available:

Download from:   http://tildeslash.com/monit/dist/beta/monit-5.0-beta1.tar.gz

MD5 checksum:    afd3beb99cd421ada8e90c5affc9b106
SHA256 checksum:  
de2a7d3fa93b1214215fdf51469c127ecd487a3fc0c68fdd18db1f07d5bb89e9
Change log:      http://www.tildeslash.com/monit/dist/beta/CHANGES.txt

This is a new features and bugfix release which has been tested on the
following platforms:

Debian 4.0             [x86]
FreeBSD 6.3            [x86]
FreeBSD 7.0            [x86]
Mac OS X 10.5.2        [ppc]
NetBSD 4.0             [x86]
OpenBSD 4.1            [x86]
CentOS 4.6             [x86]
CentOS 5.1             [x86]
Fedora 8               [x86]


We are also pleased to announce that we have reached a point where we  
can release the first version of m/monit 2.0. M/monit is an  
application for managing monit instances and a server which monit  
instances can post events to for statistical and historical purposes.

You can download m/monit from, http://tildeslash.com/mmonit/ and watch  
a screen cast demonstrating m/monit here, http://tildeslash.com/mmonit/screencast/mmonit.mov


Version 5.0 beta:
-----------------

NEW FEATNEW FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS:
* M/Monit support added.

* Added a protocol test for testing the SIP protocol which is
 used by popular communication servers such as Asterisk and
 FreeSWITCH. We received two patches for this protocol and have
 taken code from both and merged them. Many thanks to Bret
 McDanel and to Pierrick Grasland for supplying the patches.

* Added MONIT_DESCRIPTION to the list of environment variables
 available to programs started by monit. Thanks to Morten
 Bressendorff Schmidt for patch.

* If a service group is specified for monit CLI action,
 monit no longer requires the "all" verb, so the following
 command is possible:
   monit -g web stop
 If group is not specified (-g option omitted), the
 service name or "all" is still required as a safeguard.

* Add the option for the 'set mailserver' statement which
 allows to override the hostname used in in SMTP transaction
 EHLO/HELO and Message-ID header when sending mail. Monit
 defaults to the hostname which matches the 'uname -n'
 output - in the case that it doesn't match the DNS and
 that the mailserver is using the DNS verification as spam
 protection the message can be rejected. The new option
 allows to override the hostname:
   set mailserver foo.bar.baz using hostname "my.monit.host"

* New EVENT_ACTION type was added which reports the actions
 performed on monit's administrator request (either via web
 interface or CLI). If you don't want to received these events,
 you can set the mail-filter for "action" event type.

* Monit start action is synchronous now. This improves the
 startup sequence for dependant services, since monit will
 wait for parent service to start before trying to start the
 child.

* It is now possible to define the execution timeout for start
 and stop commands. If the timeout option is omitted, by
 default the timeout is 30 seconds. You can thus override
 the timeout for example for services which are starting slower.
 Example syntax:
   start program = "/bin/foo start" with timeout 60 seconds

* The event passed state is renamed to succeeded as this name
 more reflects the state of things.

* The device service test is renamed to filesystem.

BUGFIXES:
* Fixed #21989: Monit may start two instances of the process
 when service restart is performed and the process is starting
 slowly. Thanks to Nick Upson, Aaron Scamehorn and David Greaves
 for report.

* Fixed #21550: Fix crash when monit event queue contained an
 empty file. Thanks to Douglas J Hunley for report.

* Fixed possible crash when the 'if changed checksum' test was
 used along with restart action. Thanks to Brian Candler for
 report.

* Fixed #22075: Allow using a mail address as username when using
 SMTP authentication.

* Fixed #22191 and #19823: If the file content test does not match
 anymore, reset the service error state. (Previous versions did
 not clear the error state and kept showing a match in the status
 listing and in the http interface).

* The 'if changed size ...' test can now be used even when monitored
 file doesn't exist on monit's start.

* If the htpasswd file is used to control monit http interface
 access and the hash type is set to MD5 whereas the file
 contains wrong format (non-MD5), report the error and keep
 running. Formerly monit exited on assert exception. Thanks to
 Adrian Bridgett for report.

BACKWARD INCOMPATIBLE CHANGES:
* The current CPU usage test which checked the cpu usage of
 the process itself plus the cpu usage of child processes
 was renamed to TOTALCPU (otherwise it works the same).
 The new CPU usage test checks the CPU usage of the process
 itself only. This change was introduced to allign the
 syntax with MEMORY and TOTALMEMORY tests and to allow to
 test the CPU usage of processes which fork child processes
 but the user don't want to include childs (such as Mythtv).
 Users who are using the CPU check for services like Apache
 webserver to watch total cpu utilization (including childs)
 should rename the CPU statement in their configuration to
 TOTALCPU.


Finally, a big thanks to ALL who have contributed work and time to
create this release.