NMIS 9.0.0c

This beta pre-release was published on 14 Jun 2018.
Please contact us at beta@opmantek.com if you're interested in trying out NMIS 9 pre-releases.

Highlights

• Feature Parity with NMIS 8.6.6G
  NMIS 9.0.0c supports the new  Polling Failover mechanism, and all  recent improvements made in NMIS 8 are present in NMIS 9.0.0c (where applicable).
  This also includes the recent improvements for Single-Sign-On.
• Can run in parallel with NMIS 8
  If your server specs are suitable (min. 4GB of RAM, 6-8GB recommended), then NMIS 8 and NMIS 9 can be installed on the same server without interference.
  NMIS 9 normally installs itself into /usr/local/nmis9, and its web entry point (http://localhost/nmis9/) doesn't interfere with NMIS 8.
  If the installer detects an NMIS 8 instance on your server, then it offers to import the NMIS 8 nodes' configuration: all nodes would then be polled in parallel by both NMIS 8 and NMIS 9.
• Full installer support for platforms Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, CentOS 7 and 6.
• Improved installer behaviour for both installations from scratch and upgrades from 9.0.0b.
  Upgrading from earlier releases of NMIS 9 (nightly or 9.0.0b) should now be supported seamlessly, ie. all required structural changes should be taken care of by the installer.
• Automatic priming for monitoring of localhost, ie. the NMIS server itself
• Node administration suite is now feature-complete
  admin/node_admin.pl can now perform all typical node operations, as well as export and import of a node's complete database information for diagnostic purposes.
• Improved and more consistent logging
• Fine-grained Operational Status information
  NMIS 9 now creates operational status overview records for every operation that is performed in the background.
  This operational status is accessible from the GUI (in the menu under System -> Host Diagnostics -> Ops Status).
• Improved robustness and flexibility of the job scheduling logic
  Long-dead nodes are now demoted to fewer connection attempts after 14 days of inaccessibility.
  Job priorities can now be freely configured (see priority_schedule in conf-default/Config.nmis).
  The intial update operation for newly added nodes is now automatically prioritised above all other operations.
• Improved self-test capability and support tool.
• More flexibility for manually scheduled jobs
  bin/nmis-cli can now schedule any job with a specific (higher or lower than default) verbosity, which will affect just that one job.
  See the help text from bin/nmis-cli act=schedule for details.
  Furthermore, all log output for a particular job can be redirected to a separate file as well (using job.output=/some/path/nameprefix).
• NMIS 9 CLI Improvements
  bin/nmis-cli can now show the live NMIS daemon and worker process status (with act=status).
  It is now possible to delete or abort scheduled jobs in bulk, using bin/nmis-cli act=delete-schedule id=ALL job.type=<something> job.uuid=<somenodeuuid>; note that "id=ALL" is required to indicate that all matching jobs are to be removed.
• Various Minor GUI Improvements
  The Node dashboard widget now displays the last time  for ping, collect and update separately, and if there is a job in progress or pending for this node, then that is shown as well.

Known Limitations

• Installation on CentOS 6 takes at least 30 minutes to compile and install the necessary perl modules from CPAN
• NMIS 9 won't work properly with less than 4GB of RAM.
  The polling engine does work ok with 2GB but the GUI is not optimised yet, and memory consumption will balloon very badly as soon as the GUI is accessed.
• Report creation still relies on Cron.

NMIS 9.0.0b

Version 9.0.0b is a late alpha/early beta pre-release, which was published on 6 Apr 2018.
Please contact us at beta@opmantek.com if you're interested in trying out NMIS 9 pre-releases.

Highlights

• Full installer support for platforms Debian 9, Ubuntu 16.04, CentOS 7 and 6.
• This version can coexist with NMIS 8 on the same machine.
• New MongoDB backend which now holds almost all node and status information.
• Better long-term maintainability (no more configuration file or default model copying necessary)
• New NMIS polling engine which now uses an nmis9 daemon and a configurable number of worker processes,
  which results in more even (and somewhat reduced) server resource utilisation.
• Daemons support reconfiguration without restart for verbosity/debugging changes with signals USR1 (more verbose) and USR2 (less verbose)

Known Limitations

• Installation on CentOS 6 takes at least 30 minutes to compile and install the necessary perl modules from CPAN
• NMIS 9 won't work properly with less than 4GB of ram
  The polling engine does work ok with 2GB but the GUI is not optimised yet, and memory consumption will balloon very badly as soon as the GUI is accessed.
• Upgrading from previous pre-releases (9.0.0a or nightly pre-releases) is not supported;
  We recommend that you delete both /usr/local/nmis9 and the nmisng MongoDB database before installing 9.0.0b
• No support tool support for MongoDB yet
  The support tool doesn't yet interact with MongoDB, so won't be able to capture meaningful data for nodes in NMIS 9.
• Report creation still relies on Cron.
• No activity status collection and feedback for async operations yet
  All collect, update etc. operations are now asynchronous and performed by nmisd workers from a priority- and time-based queue, but support for capturing and displaying results of the operations is not completed yet. At this time only the nmis log contains that information.
  For edits from the GUI that implies that subsequent node updates cannot be observed in the GUI at this time.
• No Documentation for nmisd and nmis-cli.pl beyond the built-in help texts.